Publicizing a Town-Wide Yard Sale on the Internet

First a little vocabulary

• I will refer to the town-wide yard sale as "TWYS".
• I will refer to the person in charge of getting the word out on the internet as the "webmaster". That may be not entirely correct in every case, but we'll use that name for brevity. Webmasters may work for the town itself -- in most cases they will -- but they may work for some other organization in charge of the town-wide yard sale, such as the town's library foundation or the middle school's PTA. And "work" may not be a paid position; they are sometimes volunteers.

Bad assumptions

1. Assumption: Everybody who could potentially attend lives in town. This is a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the webmaster believes this, then he/she will fail to reach potential attendees who don't live in the town. In the best cases, I have seen lots of well-publicized TWYSs where more than half the shoppers are from out of town. That increases the value of the TWYS to the town's residents -- the webmaster's constituency. Conversely, I have also seen TWYSs where even the people running the sales were griping loudly and angrily about how poorly the publicity was done. (I attended one of those this morning, which is the inspiration for this article.)
2. Assumption: Everybody who could potentially attend receives my notifications on my favorite platform. Webmasters! Not everybody is on Facebook (nor Twitter nor Instagram, if those are your favorites). And even if they are, they may not be receiving blanket notifications of local events. Not everybody watches your town's web site for events. Not everybody is on your town's mailing list. In fact, if you understand Bad Assumption #1, that alone would mean that your notifications are probably not reaching a majority of people that would be interested.
3. Assumption: People are able and willing to pick up a printed page of participants. Just plain wrong! Out-of-town shoppers are not going to drive to your town in advance just to pick up the list. And out-of-towners don't know the streets, so they are the ones who need it in advance, to look at the list and the map and plan their path. If you tell them, "Pick up the list of participants that morning at the town offices," they will not attend. (I say "they". Let me be more precise: I will not attend! I am making an assumption here myself: that others react as I do.)

Checklist

• "Publicity" is what lets people know that a TWYS is going to happen.
• "Information" is what people who might attend the TWYS need in order to properly navigate their way around the TWYS. The most important part of this information is the list of participating addresses.
  

1. Create a blank information page. The information page will be a list of participants at a bare minimum. It may also include a map, a narrative for each yard sale, etc, but those are optional. The information page will be empty for now. You need to create an empty page first for a couple of reasons. (a) to be sure you know how to format it, and you have the tools to do so; (b) to provide a working link to the information when you put your publicity in various places, even if the information is not yet filled in. The links should all point to this page.
   
   It is almost essential to start the empty page with an announcement like, "Under construction. Check back Friday noon for the complete list of participating houses." People are going to click on the link in your publicity blurbs, so they will encounter this page. Its presence and the announcement will reassure them that they will be able to access the information Friday night after your offices have closed. Be sure to:
   • Include on the "under construction" announcement the date and time the information will be available.
   • Get the information there by that date and time.
   If you miss either one, you will get phone calls and messages asking when and where.
   
   Now here's the magic. There is only one information page deployed. Ever! Every publicity page will include - prominently - a link to the information page. Why do it this way? Here are a few good reasons:
• You only have to enter the information once, in one place. Same for deploying the information. You don't have to put it everywhere; in fact, it makes things worse if you do.
  
• You never have pages out of sync with one another. If a household is on the list, they are on the list everywhere you publicized things. That is because the publicity, rather than containing the information itself, points to the one information page that is as up-to-date as you have made it.
  
• If you have to change some information (e.g. - you spelled a street name wrong), you only have to change it in one place, not everywhere. Which brings us to the very real case...
• If you have to change information at the last minute (e.g. - the mayor's daughter signed up after the deadline), you only have to change it in one place, not everywhere.
IT professionals, programmers and database administrators, know this rule and live it every day. They avoid duplicating data when it needs to have a consistent value everywhere it is used. It's good for your publicity campaign, too.
2. Distribute your publicity. Put it everywhere you can think of. Hit the social media, the town web site, Craigslist, etc. I have more to say about this below.
3. Fill in the information page once you have the list of participating households. Few towns provide more than the bare minimum of information. There are ways to make the experience even better for the shoppers. The most important of these extras is a worthwhile map, but even that is far less important than the list.

Where to publicize

• Town resources, like the town web site and/or the mailing list. Be sure the announcement is on the web site in a prominent place, for at least the week in advance of the TWYS -- and with a link to the information page. But this is just a start. It barely scratches the surface. It will leave out all the out-of-town shoppers you might want to get.
• Craigslist. Don't forget this! It's free, easy, and a lot of people check it when they look for yard sales. Craigslist is organized by region; make sure you post the ad in your region. If I were doing it, I'd post a publicity announcement well in advance (a week or even a month) and then definitely post another two or three days in advance. The first might get it onto calendars, though many people will miss it because they filter by date. The second will get those planning this weekend's yard saling.
• Social media, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. The webmaster responsible for today's fiasco assumed that it would reach everybody by putting it on the town's own Facebook page. Hello! Some people are not on Facebook. Almost nobody outside your town follows your town's page. Only a fraction of your town's residents follow your town's page. There are other fallacies with that assumption, but these few are obvious and rather fatal.
• Multiple places on social media. (I believe this is true about Facebook; don't know about other social media.) "Events" are not the same database as "marketplace". Yard sales are listed in "marketplace". So be sure that your TWYS is listed in both databases separately. If you make it just an "event", people searching for yard sales won't find it.
• Local classified ads. Most newspapers, even small local media, have a web presence. Placing a classified ad with them is a harder choice, and possibly unnecessary. It's harder because it often isn't free. It may reach a few people who are old school when they look for yard sales, but it becomes less relevant with every passing year. It is only a few years ago (5? 8?) that I attended more yard sales I found in the Asbury Park Press than I found on Craigslist. That has reversed in the past few years, and emphatically so.
• Specialty yard sale sites and mailing lists. They do exist, but I'm skeptical they are useful. Examples are yardsale.com and garagesales.com. The problem is the usual networking problem: if you don't have a large following, you won't get a large following.

1. The publicity page is not the information page! It is actually a bad idea to make them the same. One reason is that you want to publicize in as many places as possible. But you only want one information page to maintain. Which brings us to....
2. Every publicity page should have a link to the information page. This is the ideal solution to (a) above.
3. Be careful where you put your information page. You will probably pick one of the places where you publicized the event. Be sure the link to the information page works from everywhere on the internet. A safe approach is to make it a public page on your web site. This morning's fiasco included an information page on the town's Facebook page. This does not work! The reason is that people without a Facebook account cannot access a Facebook page even if they are using a link to the page; Facebook will block the access. Believe it or not, there are people who resolutely refuse to have a Facebook account, and that number seems to be growing, not shrinking. They can't get to your information page on Facebook, even if you give them a link right to it. Wherever you put the information page, be sure it can be reached by anybody from anywhere.

The Information Page

Global information about all the sales

List of addresses of participating households

• Makes it available only on photocopied paper handouts on the day of the sale, or perhaps one day before.
• Forgets to post it on the internet.
• Posts it to a place where nobody is likely to find it. (That is what happened today. Even the townspeople holding the sales failed to find it. And they did look. I had to email the town's office, and they told me to look on the town's Facebook page. I might add that I was the only out-of-towner there, as far as I could tell.)

Map

1. Go to Google MyMaps. This is a Google application (part of Google Maps) that allows you to put multiple addresses on a single map. Initialize a new map, with the name and description of the TWYS. (E.g.- "Smallville town-wide yard sale, Oct 2019".)
2. Enter each of the addresses of participating households. BTW, if the list is already in text form, you can just copy-and-paste from the list. That is why I recommend text rather than image for the list. If I have to make the map from your list, I don't want to be typing or thumbing addresses by hand from a print or image list.
   Now look at the map; there will be a bold blue marker at the address. If the location appears correct, then click "Add this to the map". In my experience, the most common reason by far for an incorrect location is that you clicked on the wrong town when more than one choice was offered. The second most common is a non-standard address format, like "201 rear" or "201½".
3. When you are done with all the addresses, share the map as "public to the web", and copy the link address it gives you. You can use that link address in all your announcements, to link the announcement to the information page. The map can even become the information page! (In all honesty, I believe but am not sure that this will allow read-only access to the public. If this grants public access to modify the map, then another strategy or a finer level of permissions is needed.)

• Each user might like to see it printed a little differently. For instance, if your town is large they might want to print out just the section of town they will visit.
• The user may want to use the map on his/her smartphone. It will behave for them exactly as a Google map, so they can navigate around and zoom in/out as they wander around your town. I have seen several people doing this -- very effectively, I might add -- where the webmaster provided a Google MyMaps of the TWYS.
• The map includes an address list, and the individual address markers can be clicked for the address itself. Very versatile type of display!
• It makes maintenance much easier. For instance, suppose you need to add an address at the last minute. (Say, someone missed the registration deadline, but they're on the city council so you can't say no.) If your information page is the raw Google MyMaps, all you have to do is add the address to the file. OTOH, if you use a printed image of the map, you will have to prepare and print the new image. In some strategies, this will require another screenshot, tilting and cropping of the screenshot, and saving and/or printing of the result.

Description of each sale