Morrison Grand Squares – NFP

We joined the Chamber of Commerce who advertises our services (dances and lessons).

• Need to be where people can find you if they are looking to dance. The cost was very small for the return.

Every month we write an article to be published. We also make a simple flyer to send out about the upcoming dance.

• Email the article to the 3 radio stations, 4 small town newspapers, one  city online source and the local chamber of commerce.
• Mail flyers to the 16 area churches in/near Morrison.
• Send flyers with dancers to other area square dance clubs:  Riverboat Rustlers of Clinton, Preston Town & Country Twirlers, Square & Round Hall of Bettendorf, Maquoketa Double DJs, Davenport Solo Steppers.
• Slow mail the article to 9 other newspapers and 2 more radio stations (no e-mail addresses).

• This year we have a college student writing these articles, she was a mainstream student last year - 2009.
• You may ask why do this?  As all the dancers know about the upcoming dances, and the general public cannot just stop by and join in dancing. We have had the following experience, when going into the local store before a dance, in full square dance dress, the checkout clerk commented on how dressed up we were. We said we were on our way to the square dance, the response was “yes we follow you in the newspaper”. How many people are following your club in the newspaper? If people don’t know you are around they will not be looking for lessons.

We publicize the offer to do demonstration dances for free at various locations averaging one a week during Spring - Fall.

• Farmer’s Market,
• Nursing homes,
• Churches,
• Schools,
• Fairs and festivals,

• When students show up for lessons we have them fill in a questionnaire. For the 2010 year we have 6 students that responded they saw one of our demos. Not bad for having fun dancing. The nursing homes, etc. do free advertising for us, as it usually shows up in their news letters or the newspaper that we are coming or were there.

Created a web site for the club: www.squaredancemorrison.com.

We are on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Morrison-IL/Morrison-Grand-Squares-Square-Dance/103260609709403?ref=ts

The following we do in December before lessons start

• For lessons that begin in January, pay for advertising in two area newspapers that have large circulation.
• Send flyers with dancers to 20 area towns to place in businesses, libraries, grocery and convenience stores, barber shops and hairdressers, restaurants and bars – where people gather.

We do the following at lessons

• Have each student fill in a questionnaire on how they learned about us.
  • If you don’t do this you don’t know how you are getting the students, and what you are doing right and wrong.
• If they miss a lesson we call them to find out why they didn’t show up and try and fix what happened if we can.
  • This is very important as this is the only way we know what we are doing wrong. Most of the time they are pleased to know they were missed and do show up again or they tell us that they just didn’t like it, and we let it go.

We created Logos that we have embroidered on shirts (polo, vests, jackets, etc.) and wear them around town, not just to dances.

I have a Color laser printer on which we print all of our materials. The initial cost is high but the cost per page is very small compaied to an inkjet printer.

I also use a desktop publishing program to make the posters, there is a free one out called PagePlus - download. http://www.serif.com/desktop-publishing-software/

I make my card using a program called My Professional Business Cards by MySoftware Company the cost is about $30.00

Software that works for us - cost free

To make the following Posters and cards I use OpenOffice which is a free program download from www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice is very much like MS Word only $200 less. It will open Word documents also

links for templates Poster, Cards,

We use the following Cards, Posters

This is the poster we send out to about 20 towns to be placed in any place that people will see it, you can see the slots at the bottom they hold cards so any one seeing the poster can take a card to remember when lessons start

we put 10 in each poster.

We use these cards to put into the poster pictured above

we use the business card stock to make these

We use these cards to hand out all year long

We use these cards when lessons are a long why off so we can get their information and call them when lessons start.

I use a sewing machine to make the perforations between the card and the information like a raffle ticket -

When students show up we have these

cards for them to put their names on