Awww man… I gotta say that last year’s Lone Star Dowsers regional dowsing conference didn’t meet expectations… not in the least. Apparently the local group left it all in the hands of two entrenched, cranky old women who had no real idea how to pull it off. I’ll estimate that the total attendance was perhaps 3 dozen. The organization is out the rent on three small hotel ballrooms that were put together for the conference. My guess is that the vendors’ table fees may have covered the ballroom rental for the first day, but not for all four days. They really went in the hole.
There was no sound system to amplify the voices of the speakers, so that anyone speaking in a very soft tone in the very back of the room (where the vendors were) was apparently heard all the way at the front of the room where the speakers stood. A simple cheapo karaoke machine with a couple of add-on satellite speakers would have made all the difference in the world. Turns out they had a small PA system (in the trunk of a car, no less), but couldn’t find the microphone to it. All this woman had to do was hit the local music shop or Best Buy to pick up a replacement microphone (probably less than $20). That would have saved a lot of irritation throughout the conference.
They did get one ad in the Centerpoint Project newsletter and the Indigo Sun, but those didn’t hit the racks/mailboxes until the first week of the month… and the conference didn’t start until the second week… only one week to be seen. They needed to have those ads out for at least two monthly issues ahead of the conference. There were no press releases. They e-mailed a flyer out and asked everyone at the monthly meetings to bring a friend. No direct mail like the Dallas dowsing club does when they do the conference every other year. Actually, I get the mail-outs from dowsing associations throughout the country. Last week I got one from the Arizona group announcing their conference. In a word, the promotion was not mis-handled so much as it wasn’t handled at all. Pitiful.
Okay, so I tagged one of the organizers and told her… “Hey, I’ve got 30 years in advertising, marketing, public relations, trade shows, graphics and printing… next time, please CALL ME! Let me help!”
Later on, I e-mailed and offered to create an Excel database list of membership that could be used to do quarterly mailings. In a word, I am volunteering to correct the problems and help save that chapter.
ON THE FLIP SIDE…
The lack of traffic allowed us vendors to get to know each other. We have connected and are making plans to do our own events. I will probably be building some websites for others, and we are all networking and swapping knowledge. We are planning on pushing for some changes in the local organization, and failing that, will probably plan to create our own dowsing association chapter. In other words, I’ll be making man times the money long term that I should have made at that conference.
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Rev. Suzanne Powell manufactures and markets a full line of line of natural stone “medicine jewelry”, subtle energy tools, pendulums, angel and fairy art and “spiritual soap” through her website, http://www.turtleisland.cc
Originally posted 2010-03-07 03:23:44. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Tags: consciousness, festivals, how-to, marketing, retail sales, special events
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