It seems like only yesterday when I wrote about How A Charity Event Leveraged Social Media to Increase Ticket Sales. Okay so it wasn’t yesterday but it was just last year and I was talking about the Taste of Huntington Beach. Well, the annual Taste of Huntington Beach #TasteHB took place again this year on April 24th and guess what – this year we increased sales by 20%! That would be a 40% total increase from two years ago. Attendance numbers were up and there was a buzz about the event unlike previous years. There were more restaurants, newer restaurants and wineries, and also a celebrity chef from the Food Network, Simon Majumdar, who lent the event some foodie cred.
Bottomline: Taste of HB Chairman Dan Page was able to report a record high donation of $42,000 to the 501 (c)(3) charity “Friends of the Children’s LIbrary of Huntington Beach” which solely benefits the Children’s Department of the Huntington Beach Public Library. According to an official press release,”This amount is a new benchmark and bests last year’s total by 20%. New records were also set for attendance, as well as VIP ticket sales and general admission ticket sales.”
“The Taste is a wonderful example of the power of local volunteerism,” Page said, “We owe our success to Huntington Beach businesses and all our volunteer staff.”
I am proud to be a Taste of Huntington Beach and Friends of the Children’s Library volunteer of 6 years and counting. Like last year, I was in charge of PR and Social Media. Here are just some of the strategies we implemented to attain our main objective, which was to increase ticket sales.
- Created video content.
What I actually did was create video content on the fly. In some of these videos, I was just having a regular meal at a participating restaurant and created a short interesting montage that was meant as a tease for the Taste of Huntington Beach. It was also meant to be a piece of shareable content that the participating restaurant could share on their own social channels.- Here’s a video featuring Deli-licious.
- Here’s a video featuring Slapfish.
- This video featuring BLK was posted on their Facebook page.
- Here’s a video featuring Deli-licious.
- Activated bloggers and community influencers to help spread the word before and after the event.
- Local Huntington Beach blogs Main and PCH and Surf City Family posted pre-event articles.
- Local Food and Mom Bloggers supported the #TasteHB with pre-event posts like Dani’s Decadent Deals and OC Mom Dining.
- Utilized Facebook Live during the event
- Monitored all hashtags not just the official one – The official hashtag is #TasteHB but I also followed the hashtags that people would naturally write including #tasteofhb and #tasteofhuntingtonbeach
