Clean Run - September 2014 - 61

Let's Start a Club! Promoting Your Club
with the Right Stuff
By Jan Manning

As I sit at my desk right now, I'm counting the promotional items cluttering
the top of it. There's a small magnetic
calendar from KV Supply, a pen from
the local bank, post-it notes from a
dog food company, a plastic ruler from
Smokey Bear, and a mouse pad from a
pharmaceutical firm. My desk chair sits
atop a red "Winchester Ammunition"
rug. But the most prized promotional
item in view is a plastic insulated coffee mug with the Spokane Dog Training Club logo on it. The mug is blue.
Not red, yellow, or white. Blue. It was
a "High in Class" award my dog earned
about four years ago, and I openly
flaunt it when I'm walking courses on
chilly mornings. I'm very proud of my
blue mug from SDTC!

to walk their dogs in a community parade. You'll create a memorable splash if
you're all decked out in bright tie-dyed
shirts with the club name emblazoned
across them. The visual impact is tremendous. Your presentation tells the
world that you're a nicely organized
unit-one that many onlookers may be
eager to join and support. Maybe you'll
expand your advertising message to
ball caps or tote bags, and then to giveaway items like bumper stickers, key
chains, or pens. All these things project a
message about your club: it has clout, its
members take pride in belonging, and
it's worthy of community support (i.e.,
dollars) to sustain its mission of providing classes and activities for dog owners.

The mug, mouse pad, pens, and other
gadgets I mentioned are known in the
marketing business as "specialty advertising" items. They're all imprinted
with the name, logo, and/or slogan of
a business or club. Their purpose is to
boost name recognition and subconsciously help you remember the name
of organization, much the way political
yard signs burn a candidate's name into
your brain so that you'll recognize it
more easily on the Election Day ballot.

Start with T-Shirts

Specialty advertising items can also
help stimulate growth for your agility club by making you more visible to
the public. Let's say your group decides
September 14

| Clean Run

Your club's budget will, of course, dictate how much you should spend on
promotional items. Assuming you have
a line item in the budget for advertising
and promotion, begin by asking your
members what types of promotional
items they'd like for the club. You'll
probably hear the standard requests
for t-shirts, hoodies, insulated mugs,
and pens. Those are all good-especially the t-shirts and hoodies, which
will have the most visual impact. So
let's start with those. Come up with a
design. Find someone in the club with
graphic arts experience and decide
what you want on the shirts. Next, start

shopping-locally! While Internet websites offer tempting deals on custom
shirts, you'll still probably get the best
overall deal from a local silkscreen company that supplies shirts for every high
school soccer team and 10K race in
your area. Whenever possible, patronize local businesses. They'll return the
favor by offering your club personalized customer service, good prices, and
possibly even donations in the future.
Your first run of shirts will be the most
costly, due to one-time charges for setting up the artwork. Next you must determine how many shirts to order. You
may get price breaks with as few as 12
shirts. Be conservative on your first few
orders; you don't want to invest too
much of your club's money in a big pile
of shirts unless you're sure you can sell
them to members relatively quickly.
Don't bank on selling club t-shirts to
the general public unless there's something terribly unique and marketable
about them. Shirts are like uniforms
anyway; they're primarily for identifying club members as a group.

Next Come the Tchotchkes
In his memoir, Remembering to Breathe:
Inside Dog Obedience Competition, Willard Bailey refers to the tchotchkes competitors accumulate over years of winnings. Things like travel mugs, mouse
pads, and tote bags are tchotchkes
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Clean Run - September 2014

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