Amber is the Communications and Marketing Manager for the City of Lancaster, PA. Whether the event is a music festival or an awards ceremony, Amber works with local press outlets to bring awareness to the public about the event. When not at an event, Amber is back in the office writing press releases, updating all the social media pages, or even some graphic design work!
Transcript
My name is Amber Strazzo, and I'm the Communications and Marketing Manager for the city of Lancaster. Essentially I am responsible for working with residents, visitors, and business owners to communicate about city initiatives, events. I provide customer service role. I do a lot of marketing for our visitor center. I sell advertising in our visitor guide, so kind of jack-of-all-trades. I do social media and website management, all sorts of stuff. We do Celebrate Lancaster, which is a big block party that brings about 20,000 people to the city. We do Launch Music Conference and Festival. We partner with them. We partner with Lancaster Beerfest, and then we do the holidays. We also take on other special events as they come. Right now we're in the process of helping the State with the Governor's Awards for the Arts, so that will be held in Lancaster for the first time. Sometimes it's business as usual, and sometimes we take on other stuff. First is always making sure that everything on the website is up to date, 'cause that's where we push people. We don't do a lot of print any more just because we find we get so much engagement online, and that's how things are these days. That will make events on Facebook. We also use Nextdoor, which is kind of like a Facebook just for neighborhoods, so it's nice to target people that are in the city. We do a lot of stuff on Instagram 'cause we get a lot of engagement there. I'll do press releases. Yeah, it just depends, depending on the event we'll do advertising with local publications like the newspaper and magazines. Then closer to the event it's just handling press and wrapping stuff up. The day of events I'm usually there capturing stuff, posting on social media, and documenting it. Something I use, too, is Canva. It's a web-based graphic design tool. I'm not a designer by any means, but you can only have our designers that we contract with do so much. For simple things like little graphics for the web or social media, I'll use that. There's a free version; there's a paid version. I use the paid one. It's great. Makes like graphic design for dummies (laughs).
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