On Wed, 2012-11-21 at 12:45 +0100, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
Heya,
I've got a question for you, experienced and less experienced ambassadors!
If you go to an event with openSUSE DVD's, how many DVD's do you need per visitor?
So, say you have 500 visitors, how many DVD's do you need? 200? 300? 100?
And does it make a difference if you also have other things, like stickers, posters, t-shirts and such - do you then need less, or more DVD's?
I'd love to hear some of your input on this.
Hugs, Jos
That's a hard science question to ask. :-) Region, event, and current public perception have a great impact on the numbers. Some events I go to, DVDs go like hot cakes. LFNW would be a good example of that. Other events, people are interested in openSUSE but don't want/need DVDs (they'll download later themselves.) And worst yet, some events, people just aren't interested in visiting openSUSE booth at all, so you can't even give them the goodies if they're not visiting your booth. The more interesting a booth is, when you walk into a room, the more likely you'll get visitors to come by your booth and grab materials from you. Interesting can be in the form of booth design, toys giveaway, who is in the booth (if the person is well known in the local region, people will stop by), etc. Whether people actually do anything with the DVDs becomes the real question. I'll admit, I've gone to conferences, grabbed DVDs of other vendors with the intention of trying it out when I get home, and then never actually get around to it. I wouldn't be surprised if the same experience happens for those who get our DVDs. Yet, I'm loathe to NOT have DVDs on the table when we have a booth. It just looks really bad when the table is empty. My formula for number of DVDs is to get about 1/3 the amount of expected attendees. Be sure to contact the event to ask how many expected attendees. Having extras is a good thing too because you want to have a stack on hand at home to give out individually to people you contact in your daily life. I've suggested before, and would suggest this again, that we should ship DVDs in boxes of 50 instead of 100. This will result in a more efficient distribution, especially since so many events are not that large. Stickers... Ahhh... Our current sticker design really only appeals to the diehard fan of openSUSE. So, we really don' get rid of many stickers. We really need to re-design stickers to be more mass-appealing. Something that says openSUSE but also looks sooo cool people will want it even if they aren't an openSUSE user. My current supply of stickers literally lasts for years. Even large events do not unload stickers easily. Recently, I attended a sticker party. Over 350 FOSS orgs brought their stickers to the table, and for two days we were all like mad geeks flying through that table to grab the coolest and most useful stickers. That tells me clearly, its the coolness of the sticker that gets it grabbed. Same thing with t-shirts. Coolness will get more people to wear the tshirts even if they're not openSUSEans. However, tshirts take up a lot of space and are distracting to the booth staff. We spend time looking for the right size to give to the visitor instead of spending time talking to them about openSUSE. Moreover, lots of people grab shirts just for the free shirt. I'm wearing a tshirt right now from an organization just because I wanted a free shirt. :-) I have yet to actually use their product. Without a doubt, the biggest draw to a booth is our Geeko plushie. Easy to hand out and converse with people at the same time. They're bulky to carry to an event when we have a lot of them, but easy to store in the booth once set up. We get lots of people visiting the booth for that. I mean LOTS. This applies to both the Geeko plushie and also a foam version we gave out once at an event a couple of years ago. They are a big draw and a very unique item because most orgs don't have a mascot like this. Everyone wants this. Excellent bribery item to get people to the booth. Last thing I want to say, it is tempting to compare to other organizations for the amount they distribute at their booths. We have a different challenge than others. We're still trying to build up community and user expansion from a much lower number than others. So, having an abundance of branding items is good because we need more people to think "openSUSE" even after they've left an event and we need more people out there showing off their openSUSE swag. That unfortunately means it is more expensive for us to do this, but until we cross that hump into larger mass appeal and adoption, we're going to have to bite the bullet and invest in good swag. So the question, imo, that really should be asked isn't "how many pieces should we ship to an event?" but rather "what can we do to make the openSUSE Booth awesome?" Bryen M Yunashko -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-ambassadors+owner@opensuse.org