Rosemarie, Eric and Rebecca attended.
The meeting went fairly well - the phone bridge system provided by Eric was quite functional - although with many people on line at the same time it would be very important to plan against background noises and for everyone to be familiar with the mute button on their phones.
The current status of the marketing campaign is as follows:
Manufacturers (like Schlage and Assa) are not very free with their discretionary marketing funds. In general, they want to see 3 things before they would consider contributing financially to our campaign:
1. A marketing plan - a detailed outline of what we want to use the money for and how it will benefit them to give it to us.
2. A resume - who are we, anyway, and why should they trust us with their money?
3. Money - we've got to have it in order to get it. Manufacturers are not inclined to give money to organizations with no resources at all - they are much more likely to match existing funds.
(Reference casual interviews with mfrs and mfrs representatives as well as conversation with Tom, professional advertising media agent - more on him later).
Being as the committee is pretty small, we're taking this a little bit at a time.
Rosemarie is working on publishing the soundbites from her radio spots on cards that can be given to locksmiths to give to their customers. They will follow a basic format of "Tips for finding a good locksmith, " with a general suggestion that a good starting point is to check their membership in MN ALOA.
This is a little bit of marketing the marketing in order to increase participation in the committee by immediately enhancing the value of a chapter membership. It will also serve as a basis for the Marketing Plan and Resume - the more the manufacturers' contributions can be requested to enhance an existing, functional campaign - the more they will want to participate.
Eric is working on website applications. The chapter's website at http://www.locksmithnews.com/ has been a great tool up until now, but it is managed with a commercial software product. The increased availability and quality of open source software has led us to conclude that we may be able to do far more with a website by spending less money. At the very least, it's worth looking into.
The motivation for updating the website is to provide a more dynamic platform where we could, well, do more stuff: specifically, more interactive stuff - forums, announcements, calendars, monetary contributions and dues payments.
Rebecca is putting together this Blog. Just as an experiment in communication. We'll see how it goes.
You can leave comments below this entry - you are not required to register to leave comments at this time.
- You should see text below saying "0 Comments" or "1 Comments" or another number- click on that to see the comments or if you wish to add your own comment.
- Otherwise, if the comments come right up, click on"Post a Comment" - to add your comment.
- If you sign in, you will be able to delete your own comments if you wish. Comments cannot be edited once posted - only deleted.
No comments:
Post a Comment