Helicopter-Dropped Easter Egg Hunt

Look Out Below!
On Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 (the day before Easter), Faith Lutheran Church in Aurora, IL (that's the church I attend) held an amazing outreach event for the community. At 11:00 a.m., a helicopter hovered next to our church while our pastor dumped 3,000 plastic Easter eggs onto an open field. Hundreds of children from our community then raced out to gather all of the eggs. It was an amazing sight. I was able to take some video of the event and I spliced it with some still photos that my sister took in order to make the video above. Check it out!

If You Drop Them, They Will Come
Our church used the drop as a great outreach event. We wanted to create some buzz in the community and invite people who might not know about our church to come out and have a fun time without strings attached. We took the idea of a classic Easter egg hunt and made it a big, bad, fantastic spectacle.

My favorite part of the event was the fact that out of the 3,000 candy-filled eggs that were dropped, 100 of them were Golden Eggs. Children who found a Golden Egg were able to bring them into the church and redeem them for a special prize. The prizes were organized by age group, so younger children received things like coloring books and crayons while older children received things like Frisbees, Nerf footballs, and plastic baseball bat sets.

To advertise the event, I designed postcards that we sent to 6,000 households near our church. (Click on the postcard design on the right to see what we sent.) We also displayed an 8' banner advertisement on the corner of our property for several weeks before the event. We sent press releases to local media outlets, too. We put information about the event on our website and advertised it during Sunday morning announcements before services for a month before the event. Finally, we posted information about the event to our church's Facebok group. We could have done a locally targeted Facebook advertisement, but we didn't. I guess we'll have to do that next time!

As you can see from the video, the event was a huge success. Hundreds of people from the community came out on a rain-soaked morning to have a great time and participate an amazing event. All in all, everybody involved with this event did a fantastic job and I was honored to play just a very small part in promoting the event.

Add This to Your To-Do List
If you've got a great, buzz-worthy event (like a free helicopter-dropped Easter egg hunt!) and advertise it via as many media outlets as possible, it's sure to be a success. If you're looking to hold your own big event, think of a traditional idea and ask yourself how you can make it HUGE. Organize an event in which the community comes together to build a 20-foot tall snowman next to your business next winter. Or, advertise for an event in the fall in which you'll create the world's largest leaf pile and let local children jump into it. If you build it (and advertise it well), they will come!

There's never a lack of ideas.

A special thanks to all the wonderful people at Faith who put on this event. So many people volunteered hours and hours of their time to make the event truly special.