An abandoned pyramid, a spooky cemetery, and 100 years of history are a pretty great place to start when it comes to drumming up media interest. But for the members of King David’s Lodge No. 209 in San Luis Obispo, having an amazing story to tell was only part of what went into a killer PR campaign. The real secret was thorough planning.

For lodges struggling to stir up interest from the local community in their public events, King David’s thoughtful approach leading up to a major public ceremony offers some key lessons that others can learn from. “It’s all about creating a relationship,” says Robert Sachs, past master of the lodge. “To get really good media coverage for your lodge, you need to do more than send one-off press releases to a single media outlet.”

Together with a core group of King David members, Sachs led a terrific multimedia publicity campaign last year that led to unprecedented turnout, increased media exposure for the lodge, and commendations from local community groups.

An Event a Century in the Making

This story begins more than 100 years ago with Frederick Adolphus Dorn, a prominent citizen in San Luis Obispo and the lodge’s master. Dorn’s wife and infant child had died unexpectedly, and in mourning, he commissioned the construction of a large granite pyramid to hold their mortal remains, to be situated prominently in the town cemetery. Further, he ordered that the door to the mausoleum remain open until the day he himself would be laid to rest with his family. His grand gesture proved not to be quite as final as it seemed, however, and within a few years Dorn had relocated to Northern California and started a new family. By the time, years later, that he finally passed away, his remaining children buried him in the Bay Area, hundreds of miles from the pyramid shrine. Ever since, “The pyramid has always held an air of mystery,” Sachs says. “People have written about it and it’s appeared in newspaper articles over the years.”

A few years ago, the lodge began making preparations to finally seal the mausoleum. When Sachs became senior warden in 2017, he headed the planning committee dedicated to the project. Over the years, the lodge had built up a robust marketing program, which included an up-to-date website, active social media accounts, and contacts with local radio and television stations. They brought all these resources to bear in the lead-up to the actual ceremony. It helped that the lodge had kept templates for media releases and a long distribution list of outlets to send them to.

But that wasn’t all: According to George Brown, the lodge’s longtime secretary and a member of the planning committee, keeping the lines of communication open within the lodge was just as important. Brown, a retired public information officer for the fire department, was adept at keeping everyone in the planning committee in the communications loop, so each member knew exactly what was going on as the project progressed. By remaining so organized, the committee was able to take a complicated task—drumming up interest in the sealing ceremony—and break it into manageable chunks. One member was in charge of the social media accounts; another was charged with keeping the website up to date; and so on. Each person followed a calendar with scheduled deadlines and periodic updates.

Sachs served as the public face of the ceremony. He appeared on local radio to talk about the event and the history of the pyramid, and coordinated with other community groups and stakeholders. “Beyond the media, it was important for us to get buy-in from other groups, including the local historical society, the City of San Luis Obispo, and the Dorn descendants themselves,” Sachs explains. That bridge-building paid dividends. Before the ceremony even took place, the lodge’s efforts were recognized with a preservation award from the San Luis Obispo Historical Society, and the mayor and district attorney publicly acknowledged the lodge’s good work.

When the day of the sealing ceremony finally arrived, the success of the venture was practically a foregone conclusion. More than one year of planning and strategic marketing had seen to that. More than 250 guests attended the ceremony, and another 200 came to the lodge building later that afternoon for an open house. In recognition of their efforts, Grand Lodge awarded King David’s Lodge the 2018 award for Best Advertisement/Marketing Materials for a Lodge Event.