Woodhaven High School has many clubs and activities for students to choose from, but how many do students even know exist? On Monday, December 9, DECA students Maggie Gaskell, Mirahbelle Johnson, and Vincent Mazzotta led a seminar after school for clubs at Woodhaven to help teach them new ways to promote their club and recruit students.
This event took around a month of planning; clubs got invites via email, packets for each person attending were made, and a slideshow presentation was created. The packets each person got contained information about ways to promote their club using the 4 P’s; Promotion, Product, Price, and Place. The promotion portion talked about how to create flyers and what to include in them, taking advantage of the morning and afternoon announcements, and also offering them an opportunity to put items that represent their club in a display case. The product portion talked about making the purpose of your club aware and what the club does. The price portion spoke about having a club budget and what you can use your expenses on to help promote the club. The place portion talked about where the club meets and where the club goes.
Seminar leaders also shared a new way of communication with clubs and club advisors. In the packet, it shared the Band App and the many pros of using it; how easy it is to have group conversations, one-on-one conversations, post announcements, polls, calendars to keep track of events, etc. DECA started to use the Band App this year for communication and it so far has been very convenient for students and advisors.
DECA board member Maggie Gaskell was one of the leaders in this seminar, she helped reach out to all the clubs making sure they were aware of this event. Gaskell said, “Our main goal for this seminar was to help these clubs reach a larger audience in the school. We offered them a lot of resources and new techniques they could use.” Since Gaskell is Vice President of Finance for DECA, she also talked about budgeting when promoting to give the clubs some inspiration on what they do with a club budget.
The clubs were then taught about making spirit wear for their clubs and then shown an intro to using the Canva website. Club apparel is very important for clubs because representing your club will help promote it and could help recruit students. Clubs learned different ways to design apparel, using clipart/images on apparel, and different fonts and how to use them. Gaskell said, “We made some examples of flyers and apparel on Canva and made sure to kinda show how we made them, what features on Canva we used, and just how simple it is to use Canva to promote your club.”
This was very beneficial for everyone who showed up because they learned different marketing techniques and ways to promote their club to the school. The members who showed up will take the information they learned and bring it back to their club to help it grow.
