-: 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).