body
Social media is an invaluable resource to help promote your facilities, drive more traffic to your site and increase enquires as a result. There are only a few simple steps required to begin growing your online presence so please read on for our top tips to advertise your venue online.
1. Create
Create a page on Twitter, Facebook and add them to your BookingsPlus website in the Edit Website section of your admin system. The icon will appear on your website and link straight to your profile. If you have a YouTube channel add this in too!
2. Generate
Friend request and like your clients, their customers, local businesses and any potential hirers. Build relationships with hirers and the community whilst growing your audience and reach. You never know who might see your post and enquire! Like us and we will return the favour.
3. Promote
Use events and activities at your venue as well as your website to advertise on social media. Take pictures, videos and speak to the facility users themselves for a nice little comment to support your posts and promote your venue.
4. Share
Share images and videos on your social media pages to catch the eye and keep your users engaged when they are scrolling at lunchtime. Videos and images are more attention grabbing and quicker to absorb than reading lots and lots of boring words…blah blah Zzz.
5. Represent
Add personality and emoticons when writing your posts and commenting online. Be approachable and have fun but remember you are representing your venue and sending a message with every interaction so be mindful of personal views. Most of all, make your venue a great place to hire!
Looking ahead to 2019, now is the perfect time to review your venue's holidays and closure dates within BookingsPlus. Spending 5-10 minutes doing so now before you begin adding new bookings for this year will help reduce your administration time, eliminate issues with misplaced bookings while ensuring you accurately reflect the availability of your facilities for the coming year and beyond.
Holidays
Holidays represent periods when your venue remains open during school holidays but you are required to exclude bookings for clubs and events which run exclusively during the term time only. A children's sports club which takes a break during the Easter and Summer school holiday's provides a common example.
The utilisation of Holidays is particularly useful when creating recurring bookings within BookingsPlus as you can instruct the platform to automatically prevent certain entries being created within a specified holiday period.
When creating a new or editing an existing booking, checking the box 'Term time only' instructs BookingsPlus to cross reference your holiday dates and exclude individual bookings accordingly. It really is as simple as that!
This example represents a holiday date range defined within BookingsPlus and how it is used to skip dates during the summer holidays when creating a booking with the 'Term time only' option is selected.
Closures
Closures represent days when your entire venue is closed to the public. Ensuring your closures are correctly disclosed within BookingsPlus is particularly important as it automatically prevents the placement of bookings into those days and therefore avoids the headache of incorrect invoicing and unhappy hirers. Christmas Day and bank holidays are common closure dates, with your venue likely to have many others.
This example represents what you will see when attempting to add a booking to a date marked as a closure
As an administrator you can personally add, edit and remove Holiday and Closure dates via the [Manage] section of BookingsPlus. You can learn how here and you can log into BookingsPlus here.
We’re pleased to announce the winner of our Open Your Space Awards for 2018. The inaugural award recognises strong partnerships between schools and their local community.
Buckinghamshire based Amersham School, has been awarded the £8,000 cash prize, in recognition of the school’s purposeful and strategic engagement with its local community. The Open Your Space Award aims to recognise long-lasting partnerships between schools and their local communities. Amersham School was chosen from over 100 entries.
Amersham School stood out from all the other nominees as a result of its outstanding partnership with the Pauline Quirk Academy (PQA), which provides performing arts tuition for children and young people from 4-18 years old.
The School has let out its facilities to PQA, which holds performing arts classes in its dance and drama studios, for the last 18 months. As well as providing weekend tuition for the local community, PQA offers work experience to Amersham School’s students interested in the performing arts and extra support in preparation for drama examinations.
The partnership is mutually beneficial, providing PQA with access to excellent facilities and students at Amersham School with classes that help them to develop vital communication skills, which the school would not have otherwise had the capacity to teach.
Kajima recruited Managing Director of School Lettings Solutions (SLS), Paul Andrews as their independent judge who was given the difficult task of selecting the winner from nominees that included schools, hirers and members of the community. School Lettings Solutions (SLS) have been partnering with Kajima Community since 2012, to deliver fully-managed lettings services in schools using Kajima’s BookingsPlus lettings software.
Sharon Jarrett, Head Teacher, Amersham School, commented:
“I am thrilled that Amersham has been recognised for its engagement with the local community. We love letting out our facilities to the Pauline Quirk Academy and seeing the positive impact it has on the self-esteem and confidence of our young people. Through this partnership we have been able to offer our students with the opportunity to participate in workshops and work experience that they may not have otherwise had access to.”
Chris Smith, Head of Kajima Community, commented:
“We are delighted to have awarded our Open Your Space Award to Amersham School, their partnerships with a local performing arts academy has worked to further community engagement which is what we sought to encourage when we introduced the award. We recruited Managing Director of SLS, Paul Andrews, as our independent judge who was given the difficult task of selecting the winner from over 50 entries down to a shortlist of just five. Nominees ranged from grassroots sports clubs through to schools that throw community events for over 500 people; it has been encouraging to see just how active and committed the entries are to their local community.”
Paul Andrews, Managing Director, SLS and Head Judge said:
“It has been great to see so many schools going above and beyond to support their local communities. It was certainly a difficult task to select the winner of the inaugural Open Your Space Awards from five excellent nominees, however, Amersham School stood out for its unique commitment to forming strong and mutually beneficial partnerships in its local community.”
Built to make your lettings simple to manage, BookingsPlus, offers a host of benefits enabling you to take control of your income, debtors and financial reporting. Find out more about:
Payments made easy
Simple and speedy invoicing
Easy reporting
Eliminating debtors
As well as all this BookingsPlus offers a built in marketing website to promote your facilities for hire, a simple room booking tool and automated communication to streamline your administration.
Our Open Your Space Awards entry period for 2018 is now closed. The awards, which aim to recognise lasting partnerships between schools and their local communities, received over 100 nominations from schools, hirers, users and members of the community involving grassroots sports clubs through to community events for over 500 people.
We’ll be announcing our award winners in the coming weeks.
Our awards for 2019 will launch in May – check back here for further details!
We know that school lettings can be profitable – we’ve been managing them ourselves for over 15 years.
We also know that spreading the word about your fantastic facilities and generating new business can be time consuming. That’s why we designed BookingsPlus, the secret to becoming a lettings genius!
BookingsPlus will help you generate new bookings, maximise your income and cut back on the time taken to do it with its range of user-friendly features:
Built-in, optimised marketing website!
Ability to generate online enquiries!
Simple room booking tool!
Suite of reports at your fingertips!
Our latest marketing leaflet will be landing in schools this week. If you’ve not received your copy and you’d like to find our more, get in touch to join our mailing list, or to chat about how BookingsPlus could help maximise your lettings.
Call us on 01604 677 764 or email hello@bookingsplus.co.uk.
Free upgrades & developments!
Ongoing after-sales support!
Built-in marketing website to promote your facilities for hire!
BookingsGuru – our extra helping hand for your lettings!
BookingsPlus is more than a lettings system. It offers you these additional benefits, along with integrated invoicing, simple online payments, quick and easy reports and room booking system, at no extra cost!
For further details why not request a free, online demo – call 01604 677 764 or email hello@bookingsplus.co.uk.
The run up to the summer months have been busy at BookingsPlus HQ, getting our software GDPR ready for our customers.
Click here to read about our GDPR compliant updates, find out what’s in store for the remainder of 2018 and to enter our Open Your Space Awards, giving your school the opportunity to win £8,000!