This post is about the how I promote the iPad (and other tablets) Coffee Club events to colleagues at the University of Huddersfield.
All the colleagues who have ever booked to attend a Coffee Club session are sent a promotional email notifying them of the upcoming Coffee Club event. There are currently about 100 people on this mailing list and this is my most effective promotional tool.
I email a marketing blurb to the learning technologist in each of the seven schools to help me promote the Coffee Club session in their schools. I tend to get a few bookings through the LTAs. I also send a marketing blurb to the University’s marketing team to have the Coffee Club session promoted on the popular staff home page. The booking results from promoting on this page is however negligible.
The Teaching and Learning Institute (TALI) sends out a monthly newsletter of upcoming teaching and learning events to about 700 staff members. The Coffee Club session is always marketed in this newsletter but so far this marketing approach has also produced negligible results.
I promote upcoming Coffee Club events on Yammer. This is a corporate microblogging and social network platform used for communication and collaboration within organisations. I haven’t had much booking success with Yammer.
I also do some face-to-face marketing by telling colleagues I meet at University T&L events about the Coffee Club. Academics with tablet devices are my targets. I constantly meet staff members who have not heard of the Coffee Club despite all the promotional activities I do.
A lot of marketing goes into getting the 10-20 colleagues that regularly attend a Coffee Club session and I plan to try new marketing tactics in the next academic year to see if I can increase the attendance numbers.
I am interested in other marketing approaches for professional development sessions you use in your institution to reach colleagues.
Tablet Project 
Hi Ola! We use Twitter quite a lot to promote our iPAD Coffee Clubs (as well as doing the kinds of promotional activity that you have mentioned).
I’ve recently had some success using plastic display stands on tables: http://is.gd/ipadccphoto However, I think they work because I use them in the location where we have our coffee clubs, which are high traffic areas (cafes).
We are also looking into a voucher scheme whereby staff can receive an iTunes voucher (or similar) on the condition that they return to a couple of events and feedback on what they have tried and how it went.
Hello Tamsyn. The voucher scheme sounds interesting and I would appreciate it if you could keep me posted on how it fares at Southampton. I am interested in implementing it at Huddersfield if it is successful at Soton.