Akron Two events on the same night, same category, same part of town. One gets opened four times as often as the other. It is almost never because the event is better. It is the title, the time, and whether there is a photo. Here is what we have learned from watching a lot of listings go by.
The title
A title has one job, which is to tell somebody scrolling on a phone whether this is for them. Say the thing.
- Do not put the venue name in it. The venue is already on the card, right under the title, on every surface we render. Live Music at The Rialto wastes half your title repeating something the reader can already see. Just say who is playing.
- Skip the dates. Same reason. The date is on the card.
- No all caps and no HTML. If you are copying out of a web page or a design tool, paste it into a plain text editor first. Stray tags in a title are the single most common thing we clean up by hand.
- Be specific over clever. Third Thursday beats Come Join Us. A name only your regulars know is fine as long as it is paired with what it actually is.
The start time
Give us the real one. This sounds obvious and it is the field we correct most often.
What happens is that a system somewhere defaults to midnight or noon when nobody fills the time in, and then an event that is really a 7pm show goes out with a time nobody believes. Readers filter by evening and miss you. It also breaks the sort, so a midnight event sits at the top of the wrong day.
If doors and show time are different, use the time people should arrive and put the rest in the description. If it truly runs all day, say so with a real start and end rather than leaving it blank.
The image
Include one. I want to be blunt about why, because it is not a design preference.
An event with no image anywhere in its chain can never become a large card in the newsletter. That is a hard gate, not a scoring nudge. It shows up as a line of text under a heading while the event next to it gets a picture, a description and three times the space.
The chain matters, because it is your safety net. We look at the event's own image first, then the venue's, then the organization's. So if you register your org with a decent logo or photo, every event you ever list has something to fall back on, even the ones you throw together in a hurry. That is a one time job and it is the highest return ten minutes on this page.
The submit form does not have an image field, which surprises people. Attach the photo to an email to intake@akronpulse.com instead, or send the flyer that way to begin with and skip the form.
It does not need to be designed. A clear photo of the band, the room, the food, or last year's crowd beats a flyer with the details in tiny text every time, because we show it at card size and nobody can read a flyer at card size. Landscape crops better than portrait.
The first sentence of the description
Write the description so the first sentence can stand alone, because often it has to. Say what happens and who it is for. Save the parking instructions, the sponsor list and the history of the organization for later in the paragraph.
A good first sentence sounds like: Six local bands, outdoors, free, kids welcome until dark. A bad one sounds like: We are excited to announce the return of our annual event.
Categories and audience
Pick up to two categories and pick them honestly. Categories are what the filters run on, so this is the difference between reaching people who want your thing and reaching everybody, which in practice means reaching nobody. A concert that is also a fundraiser should be tagged as both. A networking mixer is not a party.
Set the age restriction if there is one. Plenty of people filter on all ages, and a 21 and up show that forgets to say so gets opened by the wrong crowd and skipped by the right one.
The venue and the address
Name the venue, then give the street address anyway. We match venues by name and geocode new ones by address, and we do not accept a bare address as a venue name. So The Well, 647 E Market St puts you on the map in the right neighborhood, and 647 E Market St alone gets held up for a person to sort out.
Quick pass before you send
- Does the title say what it is without naming the venue or the date?
- Is the start time the time a person should show up?
- Is there an image somewhere, on the event, the venue or the org, and does it read at thumbnail size?
- Does sentence one stand on its own?
- Are the categories the ones a stranger would guess?
- Venue name and street address both present?
That is about ninety seconds of work and it is most of the gap between the listings that do well and the ones that do not. If your event runs on a schedule rather than once, read the one on recurring events next.