Setting up a web chat and marketing the chat event to prospects is just half the battle to ensure a great turn out. Here are few tips to make your ease the management of your chat events.
Tip 1: Use cool software to help with RSVPs
Managing RSVPs for an event on paper or with Excel is a pain. There are lots of cool web tools out there to help with RSVPs, and some are free.
Robust services like eventbrite, upcoming and SurveyMonkey offer lots of helpful features, but usually have fees. Wufoo is am outstanding tool to easily create a great looking online form without any programming. While Wufoo doesn’t offer full RSVP features like the other services, they have free plans and are dead simple to use.
Also, be sure to check out Techsoup.org’s great write up on RSVP tools.
Bottom line: You shouldn’t be using paper or Excel to track RSVPs. Bite the bullet and use an online tool. It will save you and your team time, and you audience (those Millennials) will love using them to RSVP.
Tip 2: Reminders, reminders, reminders!
Just having a full RSVP list isn’t enough to ensure a great turn out. You need to remind your attendees of the event. We suggest three simple guidelines for reminders:
- Send a reminder the day before the chat
- Send a reminder 10 minutes before the chat is set to start, but ensure the room is open before you send the reminder. You need to ensure immediate click throughs can get right into the room. They won’t come back later to try again.
- Call no-show attendees on the phone at the start of the chat.
The one day and 10-minute reminders are easy. And you and two colleagues can make a few dozen phone calls rather quickly. Getting a few extra students into the chat room can mean a few extra applicants and (hopefully) admitted and enrolled students. That is thousands of dollars in tuition and a few more applicants closer to your admissions goals.
Tip 3: Practice makes perfect
The sad truth about technology is that something that can go wrong, will. That nagging concern in the back of your head that you keep telling yourself won’t happen, probably will at exactly the wrong time (and in front of your boss).
The good news it’s easy to prevent problems. A few days before the event, run a practice of the chat event.
You don’t need to mock chat for an hour, but you need to make sure you can get each moderator logged into the chat room from the computer they will be using. And ask a few work studies (and ask them to recruit some friends from home to join) to gather in the chat room at the same time. Spend just a few minutes chatting, make sure everyone can login and understands how the system works.
A 15 minute practice will identify any problems that need addressing and make you look all the more professional when the event goes off without a hitch.
Bonus tip: Use text messages to send chat reminders
Millennails love text messages. They use text to chat with friends, siblings and parents. Universities are even texting admissions results. Texts are immediate, cheap (free to you) and are more likely to be read by a millennial than an email.
A text message reminder is a high impact method to keep your chat event on the mind of your prospect.
