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Filling a Need
The IAGSDC has decided to discontinue their bi-monthly mailout service. For many years, member clubs could send flyers or documents to the IAGSDC secretary who would then sort them all and mail copies to each member club in turn. Thus, every club would have every other club's festival flyers and only one person needed to have all of the contact information for each club.
Of course, there were occasionally problems: many individual clubs did not update the IAGSDC database when there was an address or board change. I'm sure more than one new club rep didn't fully comprehend the instructions (the IAGSDC doesn't do the photocopying for you: you must provide 70 copies, no more than 210 in total, all docs must be received by the IAGSDC by the first Saturday of the even numbered months, etc.). Despite the headaches however, it was a valuable service to those of us who run weekend festivals.
As I said at the opening, the IAGSDC has discontinued this service. Now all member clubs have to mail their own flyers to member clubs. And this now leads to a more difficult issue...
Now, more than ever, it is critical that member clubs keep their contact information current. I used the IAGSDC web site's member club "Fast Facts" to find addresses for clubs but then cross-checked against their individual web sites. For the most part, they matched but at least one --I'm looking at you, Sho-Me Squares!-- there was a discrepancy between the IAGSDC information and the club's web site.
Further, we now have to decide who is worth a mailing and who isn't. Each double-sided flyer costs us a little less than $0.05; mailing 20 copies costs $2.07, not including the cost of the envelope itself. I'm estimating a total cost of about $3.25 per 20 copy mail-out to a domestic US square dance club. Since there are about 60 member clubs, we have to cull the herd a bit to determine where we get the most bang for our square dance festival buck.
I'm currently working on flyer distribution for the DC Lambda Squares' two fly-ins: ACDC 2011 in February and Harvest Festival Hoedown 17 in November. Earlier this week, I sent copies of the flyers to most of the staff callers for both events (I'm hand-delivering flyers to John Marshall and Linda Kendall since they're local).
Our nearby regional clubs definitely get stacks of flyers as the bulk of our attendees from outside our own club come from them: Chesapeake Squares, Times Squares, Independence Squares, Hotlanta Squares and Delmarvelous Squares. We get sporadic attendance from other clubs: Boston Uncommons, Chi-Town Squares, Grand River Squares, Cadillac Squares, Gateway Squares, Sho-Me Squares and such. I'm sure Kris Jensen will share her stack of flyers with the Wilde Bunch. :-)
We do get some attendees from the west coast, but mostly for our ACDC event. Then again, they tend to be regulars and probably already registered while they were here last year, or are already aware of the event and are registering online. Would the flyers do any good there? Maybe... I'm sending some for ACDC to the Midnight Squares
And that leaves everyone else: Portland, Seattle, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, the rest of the SF Bay area, San Diego, Palm Springs, Long Beach, Sacramento, Phoenix, Tucson and so on. I have absolutely no idea which ones should be on our mailing list and which would be a waste of a dead tree for whatever reason.
I can't be the only person struggling to find a good way to tackle this issue. How are others tackling this problem?
For 2012 and beyond, I'm working on tracking the travels & adventures of our own club members so they can hand-delivery flyers to various clubs. I'm also taking flyer packets with me to the Atlanta IAGSDC convention in July to distribute to various clubs. That doesn't solve my current dilemma but the task will get better with some planning.
Of course, there were occasionally problems: many individual clubs did not update the IAGSDC database when there was an address or board change. I'm sure more than one new club rep didn't fully comprehend the instructions (the IAGSDC doesn't do the photocopying for you: you must provide 70 copies, no more than 210 in total, all docs must be received by the IAGSDC by the first Saturday of the even numbered months, etc.). Despite the headaches however, it was a valuable service to those of us who run weekend festivals.
As I said at the opening, the IAGSDC has discontinued this service. Now all member clubs have to mail their own flyers to member clubs. And this now leads to a more difficult issue...
Now, more than ever, it is critical that member clubs keep their contact information current. I used the IAGSDC web site's member club "Fast Facts" to find addresses for clubs but then cross-checked against their individual web sites. For the most part, they matched but at least one --I'm looking at you, Sho-Me Squares!-- there was a discrepancy between the IAGSDC information and the club's web site.
Further, we now have to decide who is worth a mailing and who isn't. Each double-sided flyer costs us a little less than $0.05; mailing 20 copies costs $2.07, not including the cost of the envelope itself. I'm estimating a total cost of about $3.25 per 20 copy mail-out to a domestic US square dance club. Since there are about 60 member clubs, we have to cull the herd a bit to determine where we get the most bang for our square dance festival buck.
I'm currently working on flyer distribution for the DC Lambda Squares' two fly-ins: ACDC 2011 in February and Harvest Festival Hoedown 17 in November. Earlier this week, I sent copies of the flyers to most of the staff callers for both events (I'm hand-delivering flyers to John Marshall and Linda Kendall since they're local).
Our nearby regional clubs definitely get stacks of flyers as the bulk of our attendees from outside our own club come from them: Chesapeake Squares, Times Squares, Independence Squares, Hotlanta Squares and Delmarvelous Squares. We get sporadic attendance from other clubs: Boston Uncommons, Chi-Town Squares, Grand River Squares, Cadillac Squares, Gateway Squares, Sho-Me Squares and such. I'm sure Kris Jensen will share her stack of flyers with the Wilde Bunch. :-)
We do get some attendees from the west coast, but mostly for our ACDC event. Then again, they tend to be regulars and probably already registered while they were here last year, or are already aware of the event and are registering online. Would the flyers do any good there? Maybe... I'm sending some for ACDC to the Midnight Squares
And that leaves everyone else: Portland, Seattle, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, the rest of the SF Bay area, San Diego, Palm Springs, Long Beach, Sacramento, Phoenix, Tucson and so on. I have absolutely no idea which ones should be on our mailing list and which would be a waste of a dead tree for whatever reason.
I can't be the only person struggling to find a good way to tackle this issue. How are others tackling this problem?
For 2012 and beyond, I'm working on tracking the travels & adventures of our own club members so they can hand-delivery flyers to various clubs. I'm also taking flyer packets with me to the Atlanta IAGSDC convention in July to distribute to various clubs. That doesn't solve my current dilemma but the task will get better with some planning.
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Not every club publishes a contact email address or maintains an email list of their internal circulation: for some, it's as out of date as their snail-mail address. :-(
It would be great if there was a single square dance related email list but the closest we have to that is the LGCWSD list, and only a fraction of square dancers subscribe.
We do keep the weekend events listed in the IAGSDC events directory, but not everyone looks there. We keep our web site current, but not everyone looks there either.
Veteran square dancers know the annual fly-in circuit, they know where to look and they know it's a fun thing to do. The new dancers, not so much.
The major advantage of the flyers is that it is something which (a) targets active square dancers, (b) catches a square dancer's eye at a square dance event, (c) is accessible to newbies who don't yet know about festivals, conventions or square dance email lists and (d) they can pick up & take home as a reminder of something to look into at their leisure.
We're definitely keep up with electronic marketing (email, twitter, facebook, etc.), but I don't want to lose those who aren't as connected as the rest of us.
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Yeah, it would be great if we had a point of contact at every club who could faithfully & reliably print out flyers. In theory, it's perfect reciprocity: I print out flyers from other clubs for my club's dancers just as all other clubs point out my flyers for their dancers. Alas, it's not quite so balanced since the rep of a larger club like Chi-town or Times Squares would have to print a lot for his/her dancers while the rep for, say, Raleighwood may ultimately not have to print any at all.
That said, I'm willing to print off some flyers to have at our DC Lambda Squares & Chesapeake Squares club nights, as well as circulate PDFs & registration links to our club membership lists.
paper stays put
besides what Brian has said about "not everyone does email" and the like, there are other reasons.
Paper stays put. electronic mass mailings are liable to disruption, sending into a spam bucket, and are oh-so-easily disposed of even when delivered by a [delete] button. It takes more effort to dispose of a paper flyer.
Not only that, a paper flyer stays and is easily scanned / seen with the eye; as opposed to even a non-deleted email -- once someone has more than say 30 emails in their inbox, it scrolls off the screen, and out of sight/ out of mind.
I'm no Luddite, with email and all; but if i'm reading more than two or three screens of the same item, I prefer reading from paper, from something that I can hold, and flip from place to place without the linear reading style imposed by screen-to-screen e-text. I know I'm far from alone in that.
I also publish a newsletter for another group I belong to, and I'm resisting going on-line. For exactly the paper-stays-put reason. Our mailing list is one of our biggest assets (and, not to put too fine a point on it, it's easier to ask for and receive donations by paper mail). That's not an argument about advertising of course, but I would still be very reluctant to abandon paper. (and that attitude will continue until cork bulletin boards and posters on lampposts disappear.)
Re: paper stays put
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Danny occasionally gives me the lowdown on the sad state of affairs in club reps updating or maintaining their websites or convention pages on iagsdc.
So for the other 95%, it's a crap shoot. I don't even know who picks up our mail at the Wilde Bunch postal box we've had since 1983.
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My observation of the new dancers in my club is that they don't pay attention to any written information, printed or online. They only learn about these things through chatting with club members, and only go to a dance when they are encouraged by these club members.
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The Officers don't run the organization (well they do, but they have a Board that manages them). So the club delegates could have required the mailing continue.
The IAGSDC doesn't function like that I know - it hasn't for many years. Effectively, power HAS devolved to the officers and a handful of activist members, because they're the only ones who care. However, there is the POTENTIAL for the member clubs, through their delegates, to be proactive in shaping the organization and the services it offers.
So if clubs want the mailing service to come back - they should move a motion at the Executive Board to do that.
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As to physical paper flyers, we have no storage, we have no one per volunteering to bring paper back and forth to multiple events, we have lots of events that only reach a very small number of our dancers because we support 4 programs of dancing. Therefore don't send us paper, we really have no where to put it or do anything with it!
Also on e-mail, links not attachments are best. Lots of club e-mail lists do not allow attachments.
See you in February!