CHAPTER TEN
Special Events
100 ELLIE VAYO’S GUIDE TO BOUDOIR PHOTOGRAPHY
The Celebration of the Woman Campaign.
This marketing campaign was designed to do two things: raise money for
a local charity and raise awareness for my business. In order to accomplish
this, I ended up spending thousands of dollars! I never spend money on my
business unless I have a careful plan for recouping that expenditure. In this
case, the “free” publicity I received from local media outlets was worth
more than I spent. I booked clients long after the Celebration of the
Woman campaign ended.
How It Started.As I mentioned in the chapter dealing with employ-
ees, it is important to surround yourself with talented people. I’m fortu-
nate to have a well-rounded staff with a variety of skills and interests. We
were brainstorming ways to drum up business for the New Year at our Jan-
uary meeting, and one of my staff mentioned partnering with a charity.
We did some research online and discovered that a local women’s shelter
was recently shut down due to a flood. The concept of the Celebration of
the Woman campaign was born.
In order to start the process of working with this charity, I simply made
contact with the director and made a general proposal. At this point, the
final details were far from being worked out. In the meantime, two of my
employees worked on brainstorming a broad list of terms that relate to
boudoir or glamour photography. Words like “romance, love, passion” eas-
ily made their way onto the dry erase board. Other employees added words
that were more risqué or somewhat off-topic, but that’s okay—brain-
storming is about letting creativity flow. Telling employees that they made
a bad choice at this point only limits their creativity and willingness to par-
ticipate in similar activities in the future. You never know where the next
great idea may come from, so be sure to nurture your employees’ creativ-
ity at every opportunity.
The point of this brainstorming exercise was to find the words we
wanted to use throughout the campaign. Once we found our concept
words, we used them for all of the advertising and public relations for the
campaign. This helps the public understand the event, its purpose, and es-
tablishes a “brand identity” for the event. After refining the concept and
The campaign was
designed to raise money
for a local charity and
raise awareness for my
business.