Not starting from scratch

[Jim 'smooth' Brewer]

Hi everyone - good to see this getting started again. I told Donna I'd dig out any previous PR committee tidbits that I think might help. The next post here is the agenda for the kickoff meeting we had almost exactly 5 years ago.

[Jim 'smooth' Brewer]

From: Jim Brewer [jjb@verinet.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 1:50 PM
To: MRA-Racing-PR@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [MRA-Racing-PR] Proposed agenda for meeting 1/21


Fellow members of the relations in public committee,

Here's a proposed agenda for tomorrow's meeting. Let me know if you think I'm thinking in the right direction, or if I'm full of it. If it's the latter, propose improvements please! Also, this is "dutch treat" - everybody pays their own tab. (my apologizes to those of you from Holland).

------------------------------------
6:20pm - Start of feeding (if you wish)
6:30pm - Start of meeting

Item 1) Establish this meeting's coordinators - moderator, facilitator, scribe, beer orderer

Item 2) - purpose - What purpose do we want to serve as the MRA PR committee?
- increase spectator turnout? why would we want to do that?
- recruit new riders to the MRA? where should we look for them?
- improve the spectator experience at the track? what would do that?
- improve the racers' experience? (apparel, Hooter's girls, results in mags)
- give recognition to trophy & race sponsors?
- do we function as MRA liasons to the various motorcycle shops?
- other ideas?

Item 3) - resources - what should we do about a budget? Who are going to be the members of the PR committee? How do we include, support, and reward non-members who want to host or facilitate one-time events?

Item 4) - graphic design (logo, shirts, poster, etc.) Dave has mentioned Jackie Kludt. Should we keep the current logo? How do we address the idea of having a "universal image" for the MRA.

Item 5) - schedule cards (2 for 1, school, directions)- Jim will hopefully have an update. Should we use different colored paper for different events (Julie's suggestion)?

Item 6) - posters - does anyone own this? Dave Gallant? What purpose do they serve? What should we put on them? Is anyone looking for a sponsor (maybe Dwayne is..)?

Item 7) - programs - Veronika Clark has done them in the past. Do we want to continue? Connie hopefully can give us an idea of what worked last year.

Item 8) - Hooter's interface - Dwayne has suggested holding future meetings at one of the restaraunts since they supported us last year. Do we want to continue their involvement? How can we provide value for their support?

Item 9) - apparel - Dwayne did it last year. Should we do the same? How about turnworker, scorer, track marshall shirts? What types of clothing should we do?

Item 9) - Upcoming events:
- Colorado Motorcycle Show & Swap meet (Feb 2-3) - Dwayne, Boots
- SFX Arenacross (Feb 15-17) - Jim, Andrew, Connie?

Can we do all this in one night?

-Jim

[Jim 'smooth' Brewer]

That agenda jarred my thinking so I wanted to mention a couple of things:

o Item 2 above hints at creating a "mission statement" of the PR committee. It's easy to get a bunch of ideas, but I think they need to be measured against what you're trying to accomplish. More spectators? More racers? More shop participation? Having a focused purpose will get better results.

o It's important to have a way to measure whether the PR work you're doing is effective & meeting the goal of your mission statement. At one point, we marked the 2-for-1 gate passes with a stamp indicating where we handed them out. It was effective, but took extra work to enter & manage the data.

o The absolute hardest part we encountered wasn't getting ideas - tons of people are willing to say what someone else should do. The hard part was finding people to will actually follow through with action on those ideas. After all, this is a volunteer group and the fun drains out pretty quickly when you're driving all over the state or sending out email/faxes week after week - especially in the middle of race season.

[turbohoje]

Jim,

on the subject of coding the coupons, what about a barcode generator/scanner?

i have some experience writing code to generate barcodes for an inventory system. it would not be out of the question for me to generate 1000 coupons based on an image merge of the coupon and the generated barcode. or for that matter have a webpage that generates unique coupons.

then these go for cheap on ebay
http://cgi.ebay.com/USB-80mm-Long-CCD-BARCODE-SCANNER-BAR-CODE-READER-U120_W0QQitemZ220193833310QQihZ012QQcategoryZ46706 QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

i bet i could get something to scan the numbers from that point its just a lookup to see where it came from. it would just take a little cheap hardware and a bit of time.

if there was an at-the-gate computer, it could also protect against multple uses of the same ticket (if it were printed or copied)

if this sounds like a worth while effort, i'll do it. it would take me about a month to get started on this. perhaps it would be useful in more contexts than gate passes

j

[Jim 'smooth' Brewer]

if this sounds like a worth while effort, i'll do it. it would take me about a month to get started on this. perhaps it would be useful in more contexts than gate passes

Hey Justin - I don't know if you got feedback on this or not, but it does sound like a good idea. For what we're thinking, I wouldn't put this on the gate people since they're typically not MRA associated. But getting a code on freebie passes and scanning them in after the weekend would be good tracking!

Anyone else have opinions??