Selecting the ideal venue for your outreach event

This month, we’re sharing our grantee’s feedback on the criteria they use when selecting a venue for their vegan outreach events. We hope this information offers you some helpful tips for finding the best location for your outreach event.

Our grantees select a variety of venues for their outreach — college campuses, schools, churches, theaters, vegfests, health fairs, sporting events, and many others. The grantees who responded to our survey conducted different types of outreach, including food sampling, pay-per-view video booths, vegfests, and documentary film screenings.

Each type of outreach, of course, has special location considerations relative to the nature of the event, but the responses to our survey reflect the top-level factors activists consider in their venue choices. In our online survey, we asked the question, “What criteria do you use to decide where to conduct an event?” A summary of the survey responses is shown below in Figure 1.

Figure 1

Our grantees highlighted other valuable criteria to consider when hosting an event based on their experiences: The most important criterion for the activists surveyed is selecting a venue that attracts a high number of passersby. The second most important factor is hosting events in non-veg-focused settings — for example, health fairs or music festivals. We were delighted to see the weight activists place on these factors because they are essential in conveying our message to new audiences. Selecting venues that don’t require licences, permits, or fees also rated high in importance to our grantees. Strategizing to get the most impact for your dollar is always an important consideration.

• Campus activists have easy access to free venues, but other activists may find it more challenging to locate low-cost venues.

• Access to some types of venues, such as churches/religious facilities or public schools, is easier to obtain if you or your group has some personal involvement with the group or institution.

• Leafleting can be done in most public places for free, but the impact can be hard to measure.

• Weather conditions (for outdoor events), volume of pedestrian traffic, and volunteer availability are all important factors to consider when selecting an event venue.

Keep these factors in mind when researching the best location for your event.

VegFund provides a number of online resources to assist in answering activist’s questions relating to their outreach events, including recommendations for useful resources and a selection of helpful materials for each grant program type. These resources should help to make the event planning process that little bit simpler, offering useful tips and advice along the way! Join us next month when we share our findings on how activists evaluate the effectiveness of their outreach activities.

Send us your thoughts and experiences as a vegan activist. We’d love to hear from you!