New Public Relations SIG "Marketing Policy"

Public Relations
#1

As the Makerspace has continued to grow, we have had more opportunities and people asking for access to our membership for marketing and advertising purposes. Some of these are going to slip through the cracks, but for an organization of our size to not have any policies in place is fraught with pitfalls and problems.

Hence - I am initiating a search for members who will be interested in working with me to create documents to contain recommendations to the board to vote on for: Any outside group that wishes to contact our membership at large, post marketing signage at the space, participate in officially sanctioned Makerspace events, sponsor something at the Makerspace or any other items in the world of what might be considered Marketing. We will probably delve into logo and name usage guidelines as well.

My current plan is to have a series of meetings and NOT to post our general recommendations online/on talk, until such time as those who are willing to put in real time and effort toward this goal have had the time to formulate a general plan. At the point that we think that it is generally ready for a vote by the board, it will be released for comment for a period of time, at which time any recommendations by the membership at large will or will not be integrated into my final document to present to the board.

I will warn everyone now. Not everyone is going to be happy and my goal here is to find a consensus point at which we can create a policy. There are already two major factions that are playing in my mind, each with nuances and pitfalls of their own. 1) I pay membership dues and don’t want to be marketed to in any way 2) If we can get $$$ from outside of the space, then more power to them.

I will be responding to this thread for the topic of people who want more information on joining, but will not be addressing the content of the proposal to the board.

8 Likes
#2

I’m in to help,
I have experience marketing to groups like ours in the past as well as I’ve enjoyed the benefits of a good marketing plan in other groups. I’m excited to see how this works out.

1 Like
#3

I’m interested in helping. What would you say the goals would be? Fraud prevention? Better outreach?

#4

The primary goal is to have a policy that can be evenly and fairly applied to the general makerspace as to what would be allowed as well as what costs would be associated with outside companies or vendors who wish to market to our members.

1 Like
#5

I will say that you should include a blanket opt-out list of DMS folks that do not want to receive any such messages and if messages are sent over email to folks not on that list that individual senders should honor requests from those members to opt-out.

The emails received should have an opt-out web site to automatically handle requests and not do things like “reply with opt-out” or “email me with opt-out”

Raymond
(PS: I work in email security for a living.)

1 Like
#6

I don’t believe that we use our member contact information for anything other than administrative purposes, so opting out of this initiative should be unnecessary.

4 Likes
#7

It should be a goal of any increased level or avenues of marketing, sponsorships, advertisers, etc. to make sure it stays that way or, altenratively, to do what Ray-Ray has suggested

#8

All past boards, and I believe the current board would also agree, it has been the policy of DMS not contacting members about anything by email except annual meetings for those that have opted to get voting rights. We get enough email as it is and it is likely to go to Spam.

Exceptions are where committees, SIGs, etc. want to be contacted but they are putting down the email address they want it to go to and not the User account email if they so elect.

I personally hope we never sell, rent, loan, etc. our email lists. In fact I believe our privacy policy would preclude doing that.

But the privacy policy applies to members. While in the past we’ve never used email addresses from waivers that are non-members, can see that we might annually contact them for say our Open House, one follow on 5 or 6 question survey question of what they thought.

Be curious how the membership feels about that. I personally as would prefer as light a touch with email as possible.

Oh, and congrats on tonight’s successful tour night, we are now at 1,522 as of 11:30PM. Mucho thanks to all those that helped (I’m OK right now visiting sister.)