Date: Wed Sep 8 09:20:47 1999 From: FICherry@aol.com Subject: ASHS: Grassroots publicity To: undisclosed-recipients:;
From: Matt Cherry At: FICherry@aol.com
I agree fully with Daniel Strain's message about the importance of reaching out to the many humanists and unbelievers who don't yet know of the existence of national and local secular humanist organizations. It was this goal that first got me actively involved in organized humanism in the early 90s. And though I am now more aware of how much effort is required to get publicity, and how low the return often is, I still consider increasing publicity to be one of the most important challenges facing the secular humanist movement.
With this in mind, I would like to share a small success story we have recently had in publicising the Center for Inquiry West in Los Angeles. I am thinking of writing this up for the first in a regular series of "Success Stories" to run in the ASHS round-up in Secular Humanist Bulletin. Each ssue would include an account of a successful innovation or activity by a local group.
BOOK STORE PUBLICITY The Center for Inquiry West success story is an obvious idea. In fact, it is an approach we recommend in our ASHS Manual. But until I tried it, I had no idea how easy and successful it would be. The short version is: The Center for Inquiry West approached local bookstores and coffee houses to see if they would distribute flyers about our meetings: as a result 180 (one hundred and eighty) stores (and counting) now post our notices or keep a stack of our flyers.
Here's what we did. We got all the coffee shop and book store phone numbers from the local Yellow Pages. Then volunteers called up the stores, to ask them if they set aside space for community announcements. (How we presented ourselves over the phone made a big difference. We found it helped if we talked about "community event announcements" rather than "adverts" or "flyers" and we presented ourselves as a "not-for-profit educational group concerned with philosophical issues". We also used the words "cultural" and "educational" a lot. We didn't mention anything too controversial, and we emphasized that many of our speakers are book authors.).
If the store did allow community anouncements, we then asked them: 1. Do you want just one poster for a notice board, or can we send a stack for people to pick up? 2. Can we mail you the material each time, or does it have to be hand delivered? 3. Do we need to mark the envelope of material for anyone's attention? 4. How many copies should we send you? 5. How far in advance of events should we send flyers?
Of the stores we called, a little over 50% agreed to take material (some of the chains could be dealt with by a single call--for example Barnes and Noble won't display announcements as a matter of company policy, so we didn't call every Barnes & Noble.) Only about 10% required them to be hand delivered. About 80% would accept a stack of flyers, with the other 30% taking posters only (we are getting volunteers to cover most of these). Of the 180 who said yes, about 130 are book stores, the rest are coffee houses. Some specialist book stores will only post material that relates to their specialty (eg. science fiction.) One spin-off benefit was that several stores asked us if we could provide a speaker for their meetings (this was more common among the coffee bars.)
All of this information was put into an Excel database, so that the whole process of sending material is now automated.
Because the Center for Inquiry now has about 10 events a month, we are not publicising every event. Instead, we create flyers and posters for the big events (these are small--half or quarter of an 8.5x11" page), plus a flyer listing all our events for a whole month. We are also going to experiment with sending copies of our newsletter to some of them (with 180 stores this could get expensive though.)
We have called stores in about 80% of Los Angeles County and Orange County, and are in the process of calling the rest. We are also going to start calling universities and colleges, libraries, community centers and some other types of store (health food and music stores are next on the list.)
It is too early to say how many new people this form of outreach will attract. But we have already had some people contact us as a result. Even though we charge an entrance fee for our big meetings, we have been getting over 100 people to all of recent big events, so something is obviously working. And even if we were to get just one person a year from each store, that would be a couple of hundred people a year extra (and we hope to do a lot better than one person per store per year.)
I recommend this approach to other local groups. Los Angeles is one of the largest metro areas in the country, so very few local groups are likely to get hundreds of stores to take their flyers. But even if you get just a couple of dozen stores publicising your events, I think it is well worth the effort.
Of course, all of this costs money and time. But as publicity goes this is about as cheap and easy as it gets. And it is the kind of grass roots publicity that is best done by local groups rather than national groups. Furthermore, once you have a database, you can keep using it indefinitely, with very little maintenance.
I would be interested to hear of similar experiences from other local groups.
Matt Cherry (Acting) Executive Director, Center for Inquiry West Executive Director, Council for Seular Humanism