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Low Tech Community Building
Low Tech Community Building
Hello Everyone,
This is the continuation of a series of emails I am sending as a prelude to our national meeting.
Ok, let's say that I have convinced many of you to take your "AITP is just a Club" blinders off, and to start viewing your organization as THE central meeting point for the IT professional's in your city.
So how do we reach all these folks?
My last year in Houston I had the pleasure of serving as that city's Chapter President. We published a really excellent newsletter which we sent to all of our members. We also sent a copy to each guest for about six months. This was great for communicating with our regular membership base.
But I always felt that in a city the size of Houston, we were just not reaching our potential membership pool via the newsletter. I also felt that our usual newspaper announcements were not really that effective either. We needed something more DIRECT.
This was in 1994, and something really amazing hit the market. PC based FAX software. Better yet, the software had a list capability! The first chance I got, I purchased our chapter a copy. Then my quest for FAX numbers began.
I made up a list of every company and key vendor in town (I still wasn't focused on the four group community concept yet) and started researching. I started with my own card files. Just through my regular business relations I already had FAX numbers for many companies on our "hit list". Others I collected from various AITP board members. Our first announcement FAX went to about 80 people.
Then I decided to get brave. For a month I dedicated about fifteen minutes every morning to "cold call" companies and vendors to find out who the key IT contacts were as well as their FAX numbers. I had about a 70% success rate, and in many cases I was able to speak directly to the IT Director or the Sales Manager to introduce them to AITP.
It was a lot of work, but I learned an important lesson:
The attendance rate for these types of announcements is ONE to TEN if your list is qualified. If we sent 200 Faxes, we got 20 people. If we sent 400 Faxes, we got 40 people. This was literally a thunderbolt striking me in the brain. Ouch! I knew this was a very powerful new resource for AITP announcements.
Repeating: You will get ONE to TEN meeting attendance results with this approach!!
My whole viewpoint changed that year toward publicity in general. I ended the year feeling that this is the optimal way to locally market an AITP chapter:
- Mass Faxing should always be used for meeting announcements. You can cover members and potential members with minimal cost. It is direct and assured. You can get predictable results based on the number sent. The sky is the limit.
- Newspaper announcements should always be placed because of the wide potential. But in all my years of attending meetings, I have found that about two to four guests is all you can expect per each ad. Still, an average of 30+ additional new visitors over a year is very welcome.
- Newsletters should only be viewed as a member benefit. They can also be a nice perk for the vendors who have joined and who are supporting your chapter (if you let them place complimentary ads).
Or you can make revenue through add sales (as our Houston chapter did) - but be careful - the chapter's relationship with an IT vendor is much more precious than ad income. I always considered ad income to be a form of vendor financial support for the cause.
Your membership can also submit articles, announcements, etc. to the newsletter. It's a nice way to be published.
I DO NOT like newsletters as the primary meeting announcement tool because:
- they are a lot of work,
- the mail can be slow,
- cost is a limiting expense,
- it's easy to put them off to the last minute.
Check the record, I'll wager this was the primary communication tool for many of our failed chapters.
- Bonus: Calling committees increase reservations! In my opinion, if you have members willing to make the reminder calls each month - you will get a very noticeable return for the effort. You will be rewarded with a larger meeting attendance every single time. Members of the calling committee should not be the key officers because you run the risk of AITP officer burn-out. People making the calls should be folks who naturally like to network, and who are willing to call through a list of about 20 names.
I am convinced that these fundamentals will work in any city for any size chapter! You can begin to use these ideas next month.
But wait..
These were my strong opinions until something new exploded on the scene back in 1996:
The Internet!
Email!
Email Lists!
Homepages!Now, I have modified my thoughts considerably regarding publicity - and our situation in Austin gave us an opportunity to put some brand new thinking to the test.
More to come...
