Looking forward to our national town hall meeting, we had three challenges to overcome: Time, Awareness and Cost.  Although time and public awareness represented a challenge, the largest obstacle in my mind was overcoming the $100 participant fee that was levied upon participants.  The fee was not of our design but rather a necessity to offset the enormous costs of such a tech-heavy, national meeting.  However, we were able to secure funding to offer more than 100 scholarships to offset the participant fees.  Unfortunately, the general public was largely unaware of both the event and availability of scholarships. 

As our team met over the course of the next two days, we devised a strategy based upon two overriding




 objectives: To protect the reputation of our organization and to achieve our attendance objectives.  In order to achieve these objectives our team, consisting of our 4 person communications staff and the staff of The Autism Program of Illinois devised a plan to raise media awareness, open new communication channels, reach out to our organizational partners and better engage our community.  For the first time in the organizations history, the electronic communications and the internet would become the chosen media for our outreach objectives. 

Raising Media Awareness
With limited coverage to date and a propensity for media to provide post-event coverage, we had our hands full.  Our media outreach would consist of utilizing our current resources and devising a choreographed plan for press releases. 

• Using Cision Point's press release services we immediately structured a general and short-version press release that was sent to more than 350 media outlets in the Chicagoland area. 
• At the same time, we released the short-version press release on the event across the internet utilizing 6 different and tested, free Press Release services.  Utilizing such Press Releases allowed us to break into major news aggregators across the internet and increase search engine ranking for the event.
• Finally, I utilized my online account with the Examiner.com to publish a news article for the national event.  The article was immediately picked up by services such as Google News and gave us the opportunity to directly target participants.

Opening New Communication Channels
The plan we set forth was to serve two purposes: protecting the reputation of our organization and achieving participation.  Many nonprofit organizations have a fear of failure.  As a result, the greatest outreach opportunities are often overlooked as they attempt to distance themselves from efforts that have failed and take credit for successful efforts.  However, as any entrepreneur will tell you, failure often provides the best learning tools on the path to success.  As I advised our team, the benefits of increased outreach would far outweigh any consequences of failure.  By increasing our outreach efforts in the public domain, nobody could make the case that we shared responsibility for any failure of the event.  If our efforts were documented and they were absent, public perception would protect our reputation.  In addition, if we achieved our attendance and media objectives, our organization would receive the appropriate credit.

In order to achieve our underlying objectives, I wanted to assure that our organization ruled the search engines and online buzz surrounding the event.  Although we had posted information on our websites, facebook and twitter accounts, we needed more to drive traffic and achieve search engine optimization.  As a result we increased our communication channels as follows:

• We identified and used targeted keywords in every Facebook and Twitter posting to increase search engine ranking.
• We not only posted using Facebook's linking technology, but also used text based links as an alternative when posting.
• We quickly designed and developed a new blog specific to the event, Autism Town Hall.  The blog was created through Blogger, designed to match our normal site and posts utilized a selected lists of keywords and contextual linking to our own network of sites and event sites.  In my experience with free blogging platforms, the Google owned blogger tends to be indexed within a shorter period of time than other blogs.  Within 2 days, the blog was not only indexed but was receiving considerable traffic.
• I once again turned to other sites for which I am a contributor.  The sites I had chosen are quickly indexed, picked up by news aggregators and provided a platform to increase traffic and targeting.

Reaching out to organizational partners

• As a service provider and developer of the only state-wide Autism Resources Network nationwide, we have been blessed with a solid base of organizational partners.  By increasing communication with those partners and asking them to help us with increased awareness and attendance objectives, we were able to further build backlinks, garner more traffic and raise awareness.

Increased public engagement

• Our social networks played an integral role in increasing awareness and attendence for the national meeting.  Prior to my arrival, the marketing and communications staff was overloaded but still able to build a good following across our fan pages.  The first priority that we undertook was to schedule targeted postings across social networks throughout the day.  The added benefit of having four organizational centers with Facebook pages allowed us to send content from different pages without appearing as advertising spammers.  This targeted approach allowed us to increase our fan base without ending up in the dreaded "hide" category.
• Through our social networking efforts, we identified a dozen influencers who strongly supported our organization and the upcoming event.  By personally reaching out to those influencers, we were able to see further growth within metrics.
• At the same time, we quickly examined how our email communications were being handled.  Unfortunately, like many organizations, each person has set up their own distribution lists and email addresses are scattered throughout files and folders.  We quickly identified and consolidated key lists into a targeted email campaign for the event.  In addition, we developed a distribution list of respondents and established a plan to further communicate event information and reminders. 
• In terms of the broader internet, I turned to key influencers outside of our social networks.  I had no relationship with these individuals other than a shared common goal.  By identifying individuals supportive of the event who had considerable traffic to their blogs/sites, we were able to further increase awareness.

Within one week of my arrival, our organizational team was acting in unison and with a clear plan of action.  In terms of my primary outreach goals, within 2 weeks, we had rapidly achieved top search engine rankings for our targeted keywords.  More importantly, however, was the realization that our organization and references to our organization were dominating the front page across every search engine.  We were entering the final week of October; having bombarded media, partners and the public with information, our team lowered the volume, analyzed results and prepared for a final push that would occur during the first week of November.