In brief
The best ways to publicize your THATCamp in order to recruit participants: email, web forums, Twitter and other social media, fliers, and by keeping THATCamp Central apprised of your plans.
General publicity advice
There’s an infinite amount of publicity you can do for a THATCamp. If you have willing helpers, put them on publicity duty — draft an e-mail announcement (see a template for a typical THATCamp announcement here) with the link to the registration form and ask your helpers to e-mail it to people, organizations, and departments who might be interested. They can do likewise for topic-focused forums and listservs. Be sure that your announcement carries a notice such as “Please distribute widely” so that others are encouraged to spread it around.
The #thatcamp hashtag gets lots of traffic and is regularly perused by THATCamp junkies, so if you make sure to have a Twitter account and use the hashtag #thatcamp, the word will be sure to get out. The @thatcamp account also regularly retweets tweets from THATCamp accounts.
Not everyone uses Twitter, of course. Try posting announcements about your THATCamp on the H-Net discussion networks, especially digital humanities-oriented listservs like EDTECH, H-AHC, H-DigiRhet, and H-Info. (Add to this list any other H-Net groups whose subject matter of interest might be relevant to your particular THATCamp.) Join HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), a project bringing together people interested in all things digital and educational; anybody can become a member, and members can post events to the HASTAC calendar. Finally, HUMANIST is a long-standing listserv and discussion group for those interested in the humanities and computing. Email the list’s editor to post a one-time announcement of your THATCamp—or join, and post it yourself.
Don’t forget to advertise locally. Chris Raymond, our designer, has thoughtfully created a set of THATCamp flier templates (.zip) at thatcamp.org/docs/thatcamp-fliers.zip in .docx and .tif format that you can customize and post around campus or around town. The blue version is depicted above.
Finally, make sure that we here at THATCamp Central have the correct dates and places for your THATCamp — keep the registry updated and/or email info@thatcamp.org. We send out a newsletter, creatively named THATCamp News, about once a month, and we make sure to keep the home page of thatcamp.org updated with the most current information about upcoming THATCamps.
