Guide For Promoting Your Event in Nailed

Nailed is unique in that we try to make sure we tell you as much of what is going on in Belper as we can.  We love Belper being connected and informed.  However, we think that we need to tell everyone how promotions work and what those wanting their events and work to be promoted need to do to make this happen.

News

Our main work is news.  News comes first.  Democracy only exists within an accurately informed community, and that’s what we aim to do.  Unpaid and short staffed, Nailed has a limited amount of time.  This is best used gathering, verifying, researching and reporting news.

Community

Community is also incredibly important, and news does include covering important events in the town.  Big public events are automatically covered, and you only need to send us promotional material if you are the organiser of the whole thing, or have a distinct event within it.

For ticketed events, if you put two tickets for Nailed on the door and arrange it with us beforehand, we love to come and tell people about your performances, restaurants, and fundraisers.  This is the only way that a pay-to-enter or pay-to-eat event will be covered.  This is standard throughout the media.  We understand that you are trying to make money, but newspapers don’t pay to promote anyone so that the organiser can profit from the newspaper’s (or in our case, the individual reporter’s) expense. This is the small cost of large exposure.

For other events, we ask that you send us what you want to see published.  If you send us your promotional material, we will happily publicise it to our readers.  Below are our promotion guidelines.  These apply whether you are a charity,  business, theatre, music, fundraiser,  local group, workshop, artist, information stand, or dancing up and down King Street, dressed as an alien, giving out sweeties, for the sole purpose of spreading joy.

We can do more than the minimum if you provide more material, if your members want to write about different parts of the event, or the motivations behind it, or if there are changes and growth to the event.  We can do update articles if you want to keep a repeat focus on an upcoming event.  We still need you to submit promotional materials, and for repeat focus, submissions of articles.  Many organisers and group members have become regular Nailed writers in this way, and if you contribute articles regularly you will get your own Nailed byline and Nailed sign-in to respond to comments.

What you need to send us to get in Nailed:

• 1 landscape (wide, not tall) photograph or logo – this goes at the top of the article and is crucial to successful social media proliferation.  Nobody on social media clicks on links with no photo, and a portrait image (tall) gets chopped off by Facebook size limits and only a landscape portion of the image is shown. 200×400 is the minimum size that works, but 400×800 is the best approximate size.   This can be your logo banner, a band, a previous similar event, the people involved, a shot of the location.
• any other photos you want included
• A short explanation of the event, including any reasons for the event, and any history you think is relevant
• What (name of event), Where (location of event), When (date), Time (start/opening), Price and where to buy tickets
• Use JPEG and PNG formats for image files.
• Send text in plain unformatted paragraphs.

Don’ts

• don’t send us PDFs.  PDFs cannot be uploaded and coded on our site (or on any site) as an image.  They are great for printing and giving talks, but they are useless as a media format, unless intended as a download for the readers.  They take time to deconstruct, copy from, or convert.  We will commit that time for politics and news, but not for bake sales and bike rides. Readers will not download a file for a poster.
• don’t invite individual Nailed editors to an event expecting that this will get it promoted. We will just think you like us.
• don’t post it to our Facebook wall as a submission.  There’s an email button on the page.
• don’t send it to us 2 days before the event – the work for those 2 days is planned, and there is often urgent unexpected news to add in
• don’t format your own writing.  We will definitely not use your font, size and aesthetic choices – those are editorial choices, and we have our own style.  The first thing we will do is strip all the formatting out.  Sometimes this can be done swiftly, but some people have magic talents for creating very complicated formating, which we have to spend ages stripping out at the code level.

The guidelines are different for submissions and book reviews, and for individual stories we will be having a conversation with you about what we both need to make it happen.  We will publish the varied submissions guidelines at a later date.

The promotional materials need to be sent to:

 

editor@nailed.community

 

These need to be sent at least a week in advance of the event.  The chances of late promotion getting published are currently low, because there is a lot of planning for the time which goes in to creating the news in Nailed.  We know that you have put a lot of effort into creating your event, and might feel that you don’t have time to do any more.  We understand the stress.  We have the same stress, every day, to represent everyone in Belper.  We’re doing something for EVERY event, and to do yours justice, it needs to be a co-operative effort.

In summary, refer to the Guidelines and Donts, and email your promotional material to editor@nailed.community at least a week before the event is to happen, and we’ll get that up for you.

At time of publication Nailed has 45,983 unique readers in the last 8 months.  Our average monthly readership is 7-8000.  Promotion in Nailed can definitely help your event, and we want to help you.  Please help us to help you by following the guidelines.