CT Appleseeders: Time to Brainstorm on PROMOTIONS

[The Log]

OK, folks, time to put our collective Nutmeg-noggins together and find new and unique (not to mention effective) ways to promote Appleseed in Connecticut. If you'll look at the pre-registrations for our upcoming shoots, you'll see that they're not sold out, and some are barely selling at all. I don't mind small shoots - if one shooter shows up, it's worth the effort. But we're trying to save a nation here, and we'll get there faster if we do it 30 people at a time twice a month, instead of 3 or 4 at a time.

It looks like our current marketing techniques are showing signs that we have saturated the market. Now, I don't know the exact number of people who have been through an AS in CT so far, but I can guarantee it isn't even a tiny fraction of the total number of people in the state, so there's still a huge untapped market. So our job is to figure out how to tap it. Admittedly, I have absolutely no marketing education or experience, and you may not either, but there have to be some common-sense things we can think up to get the message out there better and fill those lines. Face it - at the very least, each of you has been the target of marketing efforts all your life, so behind it all, we all have some idea what works and what doesn't.

I'd like this thread to be a running tally of promotional ideas, so pitch in with what you've got. Remember, these are just ideas - some will be great, some will stink, but they all should get us thinking at the very least.

With that in mind, I'd like to start off the list with some ideas that sprang from a discussion that we had at the instructor's dinner after the last Colebrook shoot. I make no claim that any of these items are my ideas - they were just discussed at the dinner, and I'd like to capture them before I forget them:

• Press releases - fprintf (?) had a great idea: each time one of us gets a major promotion (OH to RH, RH to GH, etc.), write up a little blurb and send it off to the local weekly. Think along the lines of "The Newtown Bee" or "The Cheshire Herald." Every area has one of these papers, and they're always looking for column inches to fill with local interest stuff. Something like "Stuart Hall was recently promoted to RWVA Instructor after completing 100 hours of training under the RWVA's Project Appleseed. Stuart was promoted in recognition of his grasp of range safety, rifle marksmanship instruction, and history of the events surrounding the April 19, 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord. RWVA is..." Something along those lines.
• Vehicle advertising - not discussed at the dinner, but I've been thinking about how some states have been getting AS billboards put up. That seems expensive, but it got me thinking about the rolling billboard we all drive around every day. It can't be too expensive to get those magnetic signs printed up - like the one's our beloved Vernic82 has on the side of his truck to promote MOA, llc. If we could get some of those printed up, maybe we could raise some interest. Heck, even bumper stickers would be nice.
• Non-traditional locations - we all tend to go by the local gun store and make sure the tri-folds are topped off, the event fliers are posted, and we maybe do the same at the local gun club. That seems to have worked well in the past, but I think that's the market we've tapped out - most interested parties have been to an Appleseed. So let's start reaching out to the "non-gun-people" by finding new venues to distribute our brochures. Some that I've tried - public libraries, brochure racks at work, the local tire shop. Granted, the gun store and your gun club are a lot more approachable than just about anywhere else, since you know your talking to "gun people" when you're asking permission. But we're not going to save a nation without getting as many people as possible to the line, and not a tiny fraction of the population goes to the gun store every day. But how many pairs of eyes go through Stop & Shop or the local Cumberland Farms?
• Fundraising -some of this stuff costs money. Maybe one of the tasks we can get the new Blue Hats going on is raising funds to support these marketing efforts. CortJestir suggested that they could raise funds to buy LTRs, and that's great, but we need to have the lines filled before that starts making sense. Maybe they (when we get them) can raise enough funds to pay for a real billboard, or some newspaper ads.
• craigslist - have we tried this yet?
• Local media outlets - I heard a bit on WTIC1080 the other day (yes, I listen to AM - I'm old) about "get your event listed for free on our website." I checked it out, and it was exactly that - fill out a little form and your events get posted on their events page. I filled out the info for the upcoming HGC shoots, but it doesn't appear to have been posted. Not sure if someone took it down, or if I did something wrong. Might be worth trying again. Also someone suggested the "weekender" section of the local paper - getting an ad in there might get a lot of eyeballs.

I've got to get to work - your turn now! Let's see what we can come up with.

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[vernic82]

I couldn't think of a better reason for all of us to have that elusive 2011 Planning Meeting centered on Promo.

Face-to-Face is what 'sells' Appleseed, Face-to-Face is where we can best plan and implement these ideas and raise others.

[dwarven1]

You guys got any talk radio shows down there that you could call into and maybe promote the shoots on?

[fprintf]

So I wrote to the Cheshire Herald, and they are interested in doing a story on me. At http://appleseedinfo.org/smf/index.php?topic=20993.0, a thread in Promotions WL-X, I posted my email to the newspaper looking for advice, gotchas to watch out for etc. I think the paper will do a nice piece, they are usually pretty softball except when it comes to Town Council stuff.

Be careful what you ask for. Now they are looking for times to come do an "interview". Janet, my wife, told me the Red Hat doesn't suit me, that it needs to be more beatup to look good and has suggested I not wear it if they take any pictures. Maybe I should have taken a used one!    But that pinkish hue is a sign of exposure, something I want to earn the hard way.

I will also add that in the Promotions sub-board that I am pulling together some dos and don'ts for gun show venues. I have it in draft form on my desktop at home, basically culling from all the collected experience. The only way we will be able to track whether our efforts are working, and which efforts are working best, is to ask new shooters where they learned about Appleseed. So if we do Cabela's or anything else we need to ask shooters at the registration table (do we do this already?  what do we do with it?) and then count how many showed up, possibly even count the number of people that stop by the Cabela's/gunshow table so we can calculate our "conversion" percentage.

[The Log]

You guys got any talk radio shows down there that you could call into and maybe promote the shoots on?

I made a weak effort a while back with WTIC 1080's Morning Show with Ray Dunaway. Sent him an email with a brief AS blurb. Never heard back. Probably for the better - I get a little tongue-tied in on-air situations. I'm no Techres, that's for sure. I haven't even got a face for radio.

Off the top of my head, there's also Brad Davis on WDRC and Vinnie Penn on WELI. As an aside, Penn used to be some sort of sidekick of Glenn Beck when he was doing the morning show on WCKI in CT back in the 90s.

[The Log]

Be careful what you ask for. Now they are looking for times to come do an "interview". Janet, my wife, told me the Red Hat doesn't suit me, that it needs to be more beatup to look good and has suggested I not wear it if they take any pictures. Maybe I should have taken a used one!    But that pinkish hue is a sign of exposure, something I want to earn the hard way.

It would be sweet to get them to do the interview at your next shoot. Just saying.

[vernic82]

• craigslist - have we tried this yet?

DON'T do this.  I was speaking with crak yesterday and he told me Firewall99 did this in NH and not only received spam emails but got hacked and the whole adventure killed his computer!

This confirms my experience with posting Pistol Courses on craigslist.  Fortunately I only received spam.  Guess it's only good for finding well, the 2nd oldest profession?