It is widely known that the social enterprise and broader startup communities are highly competitive. Yet, over the past several years we’ve witnessed the culture of solidarity among entrepreneurs and those who support them.

Whether you’re a local social enterprise or a fast-growing national nonprofit, your peers and supporters want to help. In fact, people will go out of their way to help. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a few tips on how to help them help you by kick-starting your event or campaign marketing efforts.

The most important thing you should consider when crafting a marketing toolkit for an event or campaign is to put yourself in the place of the user, or the person that is willing to help promote on your behalf. If the toolkit isn’t user friendly and you wouldn’t use it, they probably won’t either.

Before you read further, check out a great example of what we’ve laid out below in our Rapid Innovation Summits marketing toolkit here.

What you’ll need:

• Google Drive/Dropbox/Trello or other cloud/file-sharing platform.
• Click to Tweet account — Get your free account here.
• Piktochart/Canva or other free design service.

The most basic and fundamental content to include in each piece of your toolkit is the elevator pitch. Each item in the kit can and should be some kind of variation of your pitch.

You should be crafting your marketing toolkit materials to use these 3 channels:

Direct Mail

• Include email templates that people can easily copy/paste that contain all of the selling points and information on why the recipient should attend/participate. Allow it to be edited for personalization accordingly and make sure it’s concise while including key points.

Social Media

• Copy/paste posts for Facebook and LinkedIn (to tag pages use “@” then the name of the page). For Twitter, the handy “Click to Tweet” links are great. Include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as a minimum and any other niche or industry-specific social network that makes sense.

Newsletter

• Includes a brief paragraph and graphic, so users with an audience or weekly newsletter can easily share. The paragraph should be around 2–3 sentences describing the event/opportunity and include more information and social media links.
• This type of “blurb” is also perfect for pitching to media outlets, especially if you use Canva or Piktochart and have a fun graphic to include.

Put it together:

As you’ll see in the example toolkit shown earlier, for each event; Innovate Houston, Innovate Atlanta and Innovate New Orleans, the tools are consistent:

• Elevator Pitch
• Logos
• One Pager/Flier — Created using Google Drawings and Piktochart
• Graphic/Photo — Created using Google Drawings
• Social Media Messaging — Utilizing Click to Tweet, one click posting on Twitter
• Email Template
• Newsletter Blurb

One thing to note when getting the link, especially if you’re using Google Drive, is to make sure you have a share-friendly link and that all people can access.

Lastly, don’t forget to ASK YOUR NETWORK TO SHARE! Also, promote your marketing toolkit much like you would the event/campaign itself, and use the templates you’ve already created. This way you can measure their effectiveness and adjust accordingly.

That’s it. Do you have any tips, tools or ideas for marketing toolkits? Let us know in the comments and don’t forget to share!