I subscribe to a lot of groups in Second Life so I can get notification of upcoming events. One thing I’ve noticed is that some people write more effective group announcements than others. Here are some tips for writing your event announcement in a way that will encourage more people to attend.

– Be sure to specify the time and date in the announcement, not as an attachment. A lot of times, people won’t be logged in when you send the group notice–they’ll receive the notice as an e-mail instead. The text of an announcement can be read via e-mail, but attachments can’t. If you put the date and time in the message itself, people can add your event to their calendar immediately without having to log in first.

– Always attach a landmark. Don’t make people dig through their inventory to figure out where to go. Put it in the group notice.

– Consider adding a slurl to the body of your message. Slurls can be clicked in e-mail and so people warp directly to your event.

– If you have a home page, blog, or public calendar post your events there, too. Like many people, sometimes when I log in, don’t have time to deal with all of the announcements and IMs right away. Unfortunately that means the only way to recover the notice later is to right click on myself, find the group, click the group button, find the announcements tab, and dig through them to find the message. Yuck. If you post your announcements to a web page, they are a lot easier to find. This is also important because Second Life limits the number of groups you can subscribe to. People may want another way to get announcements without being subscribed to the group.

– Create different groups for event announcements and chat. For example, I love giant robots and immediately subscribed to one sim’s fan group so I could get updates when new avatars were available. But sadly, like most of my friends I quickly unsubscribed because the constant IM chatter was disruptive. Two groups solves that problem.

– Don’t forget the basics: Who, What, When, Where and Why. This seems obvious, but it’s easy to forget. Think of it like any other kind of invitation: if I don’t know where to go, when to show up, or why I should bother, then I’m probably not going to attend. Keep the basic notice short and sweet, but it’s always good to put more details and reasons to attend as an attached notecard.

– Send a follow-up notice with a landmark, or an IM with a slurl, a few minutes before the event. Not only does this serve as a reminder, this prevents people from having to dig through their inventory or e-mail to find the landmark. Don’t go crazy with reminders or people will view it as spam, but a single reminder when the event is ready to start is a big convenience.

Tags: attachments, current events, event, group_notice, second life, tips, tutorial

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 1:18 pm and is filed under General, Second Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.