(Super Teen, Date Unknown)
SuperTeen:So you're taking over the Backstreet Boys fan club, Denise?
Denise: My goal is to provide the best service to fans...We want to try to give them the best fan club we can put together...At one point we discovered that there was a warehouse with 12,000 letters just sitting there [still unattended]. So I ended up taking things home. I had a garage full of mail to sort through--I filled other people's garages, too. My mother, my aunt, her daughter, and I went through as much as we could. Now I have a staff and an office in Orlando with interns that have been begging to work with me. Everyone is helping and we're having a good time...
What kind of things can fans get?
We're getting a fan pack put together with a merchandiser. We'll give them a folder and in that folder there will be a membership card, a poster, they'll get a key chain and a nice welcome letter signed by me. That'll be the starter kit, but there will aso be a [quarterly] newsletter, about six pages to start, but eventually we want it to be magazine quality with the glossy finish and everything. We're putting that together now, with lots of little contests and tidbits that the kids would like. It will also be in conjunction with the web site. We will have a fan club web page as well. I want to do a separate entity adn we're going to try to go out and gather pictures and thigns that are fresh for the newcomers. We're trying to have exclusive merchandise for the fan club and it will be labeled as such. But instead of calling it the Backstreet Boys fan club, we call it the Backstreet Boys Fun Club.
What does it cost to join?
Right now it costs $24.95 to join and that gives you a year's membership with all the stuff included. Any other merchandise will be available to buy, however I do not want to over-merchandise the club. One of the key things that I do want to do is try to put a little bit of a lid on the rumor mill. I go into the chat rooms quite a bit and I listen to the messages on our hotline, and we've been trying to answer some of these things as truthfully as possible. But some things get so out of hand and I try to squelch what I can as soon as I can...
Are the boys going to do anything special, like an occasional phone call for the fan club?
In some of the contests, on the web page, we'll have like 25 trivia questions and if you get a certain number of them right, there will be their voice saying, "Hey, you got so many right!" So it's personalized...
Will you be consolidating all of the fan clubs, including the UK and Germany?
I'm devoting this fan club to the States and Canada. I'm not as versed on the E-commerce. Once we see how that works with the web page, then I will decide how these affiliations will be able to work together. I want to keep the UK and German fan clubs, because they've worked with the Boys for years. I want to do it in a way that makes it easy for everyone, yet still have cohesiveness.
How many letters do you see?
Coming to our personal P.O. Box, there were hundreds per week. We get letters left at the house--the mail that's still coming to my parents' home, which is where I lived before I moved with A.J. My mother told me she opened the front door and there was a letter and a CD from a girl in Germany who wanted me to listen to the CD. So I was like, "What can I do?!"...We also get box loads from the management company every couple of weeks. So right now we get about 8,000 letters a week. The other day we got 2,000.
Do you have any idea how many fans you have in the club right now worldwide, or is it still to disorganized to tell?
It's difficult to tell, but I'd say...well in the UK there were 10,000 paid memberships...And here, we have about 10,000 in our database, which is about two months worth of entering information.
Is there an address where fans can write if they'd like to join?
Sure. They can write to the Backstreet Boys Fun Club, P.O. Box 695004, Orlando, FL 32869-5004. The hotline number is 1-407-903-0323 [this is not a toll free call--ed.]. It's on the web site. There is someone in my office who will try to keep that updated as much as possible. And thanks for letting me share all of this with your readers.
SuperTeen
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