The hardest thing about starting any new project is getting other people as excited about it as you are. We’ve had some great experiences with our Kindness Postbox launch thanks to a mix of having an incredibly receptive community and some marketing expertise from our founders. In this article, we’ll run you through the basics of how to build a buzz around your box before you even start building one so you can get some momentum and launch with a bang.
Know Your Audience
It feels strange to talk about “marketing” when you’re dealing with something altruistic like the Kindness Postbox, but everything we did to build our following started with some basic marketing principals, the most important of which is Know Your Audience.
We knew from the start that we wanted to work closely with our community. So we turned to the platform that local communities thrive on more than any other. Facebook. One quick post in a local group for our town about the idea and before long we had garnered over 200 likes and comments, with every single one being massively enthusiastic.
Build Your Platform
The natural progression from our early surge in popularity was to quickly make our own group so we could keep interested people up to date on the progress of the box.
You can do this easily on Facebook on a PC by clicking the + symbol beside the messenger symbol and choosing Group from the dropdown menu. For your Kindness Postbox, you could opt to create a page instead of a group. We chose a Group because we knew we wanted this to be a collaborative process with our community and it allowed for free discussion.
Once you have your group, you should do some quick work putting up a cover photo and possibly setting some trusted friends as moderators. Then you can start inviting people, share your group link with a quick description of the project in your local groups, particularly any that have a charitable leaning. For our group, we made sure to post the link to anyone who had commented under our original post.
Now that you have a group, and hopefully a few members you can start to use the group to build excitement. Post some progress pics of your box, or some letters you have received. Keep the content relevant, aim to foster conversation, and try not to spam the group too much. You’ll quickly find yourself building a healthy community.
This Is Local News, For Local People
If you’ve managed to build a buzz online already, your next step should be to work on getting some coverage in local newspapers, or newsletters. We got an article in our local paper that caused a massive surge in popularity, but even just a mention in a community newsletter or a share from a local authority figure’s Facebook profile can make a huge difference in people joining your group.
Doing some outreach to well-known people in your community can help raise the profile of your project significantly. We found that once word got out about our project, we started getting contacted by local artists wanting to do art for postcards, local papers wanting to do a story on the Kindness Postbox, and even local Schools asking us to bring the box to them.
Of course, you should remember that although marketing is important, the focus should always be on getting your box to the right people. Marketing is just a tool to use on that journey.
