[vox] Advertising LUGOD on Unitrans?

[G Fitzgerald]

I _very_ strongly feel this would be an irresponsible use of our funds.
My thoughts echo Bill Ward's: To be blunt, I think we'd significantly
decrease funding which has taken years to build, and I think we'd
draw very few "new" people (certainly few who would "stay" long-term),
and it would likely be years before we recovered the expenditure.

Assuming our balance is roughly $960

$960
-$100 to be on-hand at all times to avoid fees: $860
-$60 (annually) for required post office box       $800
-$505 for advertising:                                     $295

1) In my opinion, I doubt it would significantly increase our revenues.
Assuming we average around $20 intake per meeting, it would take
us more than 25 months, or 2 years, just to break even and recoup
the expenditure.

2) If it were very successful, we couldn't handle the increased
attendees. Consider our new meeting location can only
accommodate a maximum of 30 people. We typically get a
decent showing, and if we got another 10 - 15 people, we would have
difficulty accommodating them.

3) It leaves us _very_ unprepared for future expenses.
What if the new meeting location changes its mind/changes ownership?
What if the library construction runs longer than anticipated? (Doesn't
construction almost always run longer than anticipated?)

We could find ourselves having to pay for meeting locations in short
order, and this would likely be a challenge, even with our current funds.
Assuming we could get a room for $50 per month, we'd need $600 of the
$860 we have available just to meet for a year, not including expenses.

If the projector bulb dies, or the projector itself dies, we could be looking
at several hundred dollars in expenditures.

4) There are free, and more efficient ways to market ourselves:
Twitter's free, social networking sites are free. Maybe volunteer in the
community, offer to present on campus, ask a professor or two to mention
us in classes as an organization where students can learn, and take on
leadership/organizational responsibilities - they can help organize meetings,
find speakers, improve their own speaking skills, work as a team, etc.

Respectfully, I must _strongly_, _strongly_ advise against this. I'd be
more than happy to brainstorm alternative ways to increase attendance,
etc. There is no need to do this now, and doing so, in my opinion,
places the financial future of the group in jeopardy, possibly leaving us
unable to pay for necessary expenses such as meeting locations.

Thank You,
Greg FitzGerald







On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 7:26 PM, Gabriel G. Rosa<grosa at ucdavis.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 05:51:40PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 05:32:00PM -0700, Bill Ward wrote:
>> > I would advise against purchasing advertising.  Advertising only works
>> > if you have the budget to blanket a variety of sources.  It takes many
>> > impressions of an ad to get people to buy the product, and you only
>> > start noticing the ads once you've subconsciously absorbed it a bunch
>> > of times, in most cases.  Advertising is a money game and you could
>> > easily deplete LUGOD's treasury and find no new members.
>>
>> FYI, these would be ads that would be up on every bus in town, for
>> at least 9 months.  ... Which, I think covers the "subconsiously absorb"
>> part, doesn't it? ;^)
>>
>> (I see a LOT of students using Unitrans, and we're relatively unknown
>> to the student population.  And, sadly, "NO POSTING" signs up at all of
>> the deliciously crowded bus stops.  >:^P )
>>
>
> Certain Unitrans lines (W, M, J, G) are *packed*, like 60+ students
> packed like sardines, specially in winter quarter when it rains.
>
> You will definetly get plenty of eyeball traffic. Especially if you use
> my banner ads ;)
>
> -G
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