1. Invent a theme and tagline to center your anniversary promotions on. Add this tagline to employee email signatures for the year, and create custom logos and artwork. We recently used “A Decade of Excellence” to help a client celebrate its 10-year mark.
2. Pitch your anniversary to the media. Let me say up front, that while anniversaries are very important internally, they are not newsworthy in themselves. To get an outlet to cover your milestone, tie it to revenue and/or staff growth, noteworthy client acquisitions and/or planned growth opportunities. A headline/subhead that worked for one of our clients in the past was: Mobile App Developer Celebrated its Seventh Anniversary With 31 Percent YOY Revenue Growth/The firm has doubled its development talent, adding 15 developers in nine months.
3. Get creative with your anniversary publicity plan. Pitch a Q&A with your company leader. Position your anniversary within a larger industry trend. Pitch a company culture story. In short: do more than throw your press release up on PRWeb. Involve your team when brainstorming publicity ideas—their enthusiasm will kick-start the celebrations.
In short: do more than throw your press release up on PRWeb. Involve your team when brainstorming publicity ideas—their enthusiasm will kick-start the celebrations.
4. Send out a media advisory inviting local and trade media to your celebration. Make sure to mention featured speakers and notable guests who plan to attend.
5. Create a dedicated landing page on your website for the anniversary. Include content that appeals to investors, donors and alumni staffers.
6. Dive into your history with founders and key company principals and establish a company timeline. Turn that timeline into a photo installation, coffee table book or video. We took just this tactic to celebration Southeast Venture’s history. Learn more here.
7. Design an infographic to illustrate your firm’s impact over the years. Come up with clever ways to show the number of people employed, clients served, charity dollars donated, cases of Diet Coke consumed, etc.
8. Leverage your anniversary as an opportunity to reach out to marque clients for video and written testimonials.
9. Take several moments away from patting yourself on the back, to focus on your business partners, without whom your success wouldn’t be possible. Send handwritten notes thanking those with the greatest impact.
10. Create a special offer. Celebrating your fifth anniversary? Offer a 5-month discount. Made it to 40 years? Send a friends and family discount worth 40% off.
11. Have nametags available for your anniversary event. From simple, adhesive labels to laminate enclosed nametags, these help facilitate networking and make photo tagging easy after the event.
12. Hire a professional photographer. Take full staff and management photos the hour leading up to your party. These pictures, and pictures from the event, can be used and reused in marketing and human resources materials for years to come.
13. Map out a blog and social media campaign to support and complement your publicity and internal promotion plans. The campaign should at least last two months, but can last all year.
14. Send event photos to local news outlets for publication. For example, here in Nashville, The Tennessean, Nashville Business Journal, Nfocus magazine, Nashville Lifestyles magazine and GCA Publishing, among other outlets and blogs, publish some form of social/society/party photos.
When Southeast Venture celebrated its 30-year anniversary, we provided pictures to the Nashville Business Journal to let the greater Nashville business community know about the firm’s three decades of success
15. Send a post-celebration email or letter to important investors, partners, public officials and prospects thanking them for attending. Include photos from the party as mementos.
