How are you enthusiastically recommending Relay For Life?
For the past couple of years, Relay For Life participants across the county have shared their feedback and have told us that the biggest impacts to a Relay For Life experience are “lack of people at the event, the event isn’t fun, and communication was poor.”
People get involved because they want to be a part of something bigger, and how disappointing must it be to go to an event and not see the community come out the way we know they can? In the same vain, we know it is not easy to recruit to our events. We have competing activities in each of our communities, we have a national product that does not have the household brand recognition that it once had, we have events that look incredibly different from one community to the next. And to top it all off we have many communities and campuses that have not seen in-person Relay activity in the past two years thanks to the pandemic. We want you to know that we recognize all of this. But we are not helpless, there are things we can do to change this!
Relay For Life looks different in every community, we need you, the local volunteer leaders, to define the experience of your event so that we can recruit to and fulfill that promise of what someone will experience when they attend YOUR Relay For Life event.
The first thing we can do is begin to shift our mindset. We have to define our events locally and recruit to that experience. This step is critical. How can we recruit to something we can’t define? Its not possible, or at the very least is not going to be an effective use of our time.
Secondly, we need everyone on the same page about what that experience should be and how it is promoted in the community. If someone is out recruiting the event as a family fun event with activities all night, but all that has been planned is a bounce house. Or if we promise a fun festival like experience but only a few teams have fundrasiers and only one option for food? What kind of message does that send to someone who comes out for the first time? Taking time as a community to talk about the event brand at a local level, what makes it unique and meaningful can help build the focus of your event experience and the way you talk about it. Then you can truly build that experience to be the very best experience anyone can imagine.
The next mindset shift we need to make is to stop thinking about having to beg volunteers to be a part of our event. Start thinking about what Relay For Life does to change lives, what it offers in way of friendships, connections, life skills. Relay For Life is a gift in so many ways we should be selling it as such.
Finally, we have to evaluate the language we use when we promote Relay. Are we speaking to someone who has no idea what the event is or entails? Is the language inclusive? Or is it exclusive to those who have been a part of the event before? If we are using the same language to engage past Relayers that we are to engage new then one or both of those strategies is going to fail.
This is a great conversation to have at ELT meetings. The RFL Recruitment & Event Experience discussion activity is now available to help with those conversations!
Do this activity at a meeting.
- Step 1: Pretend you are doing a 30 sec commercial for your event – what would you say?
- Step 2: Think through the activities in the deck and have some group discussion.
- Step 3: Try the 30 sec commercial again – and see how it has changed.
How are you now enthusiastically recommending YOUR Relay For Life?
