This page was provided by Christie Nix of the Virginia Tech Parachute Club. Christie has accomplished a tremendous amount as a college club President and she is still providing clubs with outstanding information. If you get a chance, Thank Christie on the Forum. The purpose of this page is to provide you with advertising ideas to promote your club. Many clubs have working relationships with their local dropzone and get finders fees for every tandem they bring out. For that reason, many of these ideas are geared to attracting first time jumpers. Even if your club does not have this type of financial arrangement, you will still benefit from attracting first time jumpers because there is the chance that they will love their first jump and want to join your club. Since most collegiate clubs are on a budget, most of these ideas are meant to be cost-effective. This page is in no-way comprehensive and is meant to be viewed as a work in progress. If you have any suggestions, helpful tips, or past experience with any advertising ideas please contact: Ben Lee at
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and we will try to incorporate it into the page. One of the first things that your club should do is to set up a website. Ben has written up a very useful section on websites here: Website Info. Many schools will provide free web space that you can use to host your site, but if your school doesn’t, there are plenty of free/cheap web hosting sites. Many are extremely user friendly and can be set up with limited computer knowledge. This site (CollegeSkydiving.com) can also offer webspace and a url that is www.collegeskydiving.com/your_school_name]. Email Ben Lee at
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if you are interested. If your domain name is very long or hard to remember, I would recommend investing in a domain masking service. For example: the url for our club’s website is actually www.filebox.vt.edu/skydiving. For a minimal annual fee we bought the domain www.skydiveVT.com. This site name is more memorable and user friendly. Peruse other college skydiving websites (See the right column on the homepage) for ideas about what to include or how to format your website. If you see something on a site that you really like but don’t know how to do yourself, contact the webmaster of the site. Most people will appreciate the compliment and will be happy to help you. Remember that your website will be the place that most of the people you advertise to will visit, therefore you want it to grab their attention. It should be easy to navigate and answer all the questions that they may have. Once you set up your site, the goal is to get as many people as possible to visit it, include a link to the site on everything: emails that you sign, forums you post to, flyers you post, tshirts, bumper stickers, blackboards…everywhere! Flyers on Campus and Business Cards Flyers, they are about as basic as you can get but one of the most effective ways of getting the word out about your club. You can be as creative as you want with your flyer, but I would recommend having the word “Skydive” stand out. You will also want to include your website URL, a contact email address, and a contact phone number. If you have the space, you may also consider including your club’s meeting schedule or a list of the perks of joining your club. For clubs on a budget, you’ll need to trade off between the quantity and the quality of your flyers. Colorful flyers look very impressive and will tend to draw more attention, but they can be very costly. If your club is on a budget, you may need to limit the number of flyers that you print. Black and White flyers, although not as visually appealing, are effective at getting the necessary information out. The good thing about black and white flyers is that they are extremely economical and you can cheaply scatter them everywhere. Another way to cut costs is to print ½ page or ¼ page flyers. These get the same point across, yet they are 2- to 4-times cheaper than full size flyers. You may choose to include pull-tabs at the bottom of the flyer so that people can bring the information along with them, although these are typically very small, easily lost, and cutting the tabs is time-consuming and tedious. One thing that you may want to do is to print out ¼ page flyers with basic contact information and print “take me” on the top. Staple several of these on each bulletin board with the intent of having people take them if they are interested. In general, flyers only work if you put them up. You will get the best results if you post them wherever flyers are allowed (if you don’t mind a bit of trouble from the school, post them where they aren’t). Post them in academic buildings, dining halls, dorms, bars, restaurants, leave them behind in your classes and on the bus… anywhere you can leave them, leave them… JUST DON’T LITER! We are creating a page with examples of flyers that skydiving clubs have used. Feel free to use them to create your flyer. If you have examples of flyers that you would like to contribute please join the Forum and post your ideas. The posting of flyers and flyer ideas by other clubs can be found 'Here'. Sometimes, making flyers as business cards encourages students to put them in their wallets or pockets, instead of throwing them away at the next trash can. T-Shirts and Merchandise We give all of our members T-shirts as a perk for joining the club, but they can also be a great marketing tool. We put our website on all of our T-shirts, thus making everyone wearing one a walking billboard. Every design that includes your school’s name will need to be pre-approved by your school, so you will need to be cautious with your T-shirt design (we once had a T-shirt design rejected because they said that “if your parachute doesn’t open… just grab the grass” was a drug reference). The website 'CafePress.com' is also a great place to use for a merchandise outlet. You can upload designs and make products, but you don't have to order several at a time. People can order one at a time, and, if you mark up the price just a tad, you'll make a slight profit. You have control over the profit you make and can also use it to order more merchandise from them at a discount. e-Newsletters and Listserves Listserves are a great way to keep in contact with members and other people who have expressed interest in your club. Our school provides students with listserv capabilities, but if yours does not, you may want to use a general mailing list or an outside service like yahoo. Our club has two different listservs: our skydive listserv
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and our whuffo listserv
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. The skydive listserv is geared to our members and anyone on the list is free to post to it. This can have a lot of traffic on it and people post everything including meeting announcements, events people are hosting/attending, jokes and links, and information about rides. The whuffo listserv, on the other hand, is geared to people who have expressed interest in the club but have not yet joined the club. Only the administrator of the list is allowed to post to it which cuts down on the amount of emails. Generally we will post meeting announcements and other necessary information to the listserv which amounts to one email every 2 weeks. This prevents people from getting frustrated and asking to be taken off. On our website we have also included instructions for signing up for the listserv. We also ask everyone that comes to our interest meetings if they would like to be included on the listserv. If your school club would like to purchase their own web hosting space, Dreamhost offers the ability to have a newsletter sign up that tracks all registrants and unavailable email addresses automatically. Some campus servers offer only limited and restricted access, so off-campus server space is appealing. Dreamhost also offers 'One-Click' installs for Content Management Systems and other website features that are, otherwise, more difficult to install and use. School Activity Calendars If your school has an activity calendar, make sure that you add your events to it. We started to get a lot more attendance at our meetings after we did this. You’ll get more out of this than you expect! And it’s one of the easiest options, as well as being totally free! School Club Day or Freshman Orientation Your school will probably host a club fair at the beginning of the year. This has always been our biggest source of tandems and new members. Typically, the school will give each school a table and cram all of these organizations into an auditorium. We will typically have a few people dressed in rigs walk around with flyers. On our table we show skydiving movies and have two sign up sheets. One of the sheets is for people who are ready to sign up for a skydive on the spot, and the other sheet is just for general interest. We will immediately contact the people wanting to skydive to schedule their jump. We will then put the people on the “general interest” form on our “whuffo listserve.” We email this listserv occasionally with updates and club meeting reminders. Info Meetings and Packing Classes A great way to meet with and talk to people who are interested in your club is to hold weekly/biweekly interest meetings. These can be an informal question/answer type format geared specifically to people who are interested in making their first skydive or joining the club. That way you are not having to bore your members with information about tandems that they have heard a million times, and you do not have to bore the whuffos with other club business. It is beneficial to set up a consistent meeting time and place (for example: Mondays at 7pm at the couches in the Student Building) so that people will know where they can find you without having to search out your website to see if there is a meeting coming up or not. These meetings can be run by one member of your club who is knowledgeable enough about skydiving to answer questions about the first jump (such as how it works, the training involved, and how much it costs.) I find that it is helpful to bring a laptop along so that you can show a tandem video (I personally recommend “spin” off of skydivingmovies.com) I would also recommend holding these meetings in a public place so that people walking by can decide to drop in. Another thing that you can do is to conduct packing classes for your members in open places such as outside on the drillfield or in your student building. An open parachute draws a lot of attention and you will have people stop by to ask what you are doing. Meeting with other Club Representatives This is an idea that our club has not yet tried, but is looking into for this year. The idea is to create a package deal to pitch to other clubs, fraternities, and sororities. You can create a package to send to each club with a letter explaining the event, a handful of flyers, and other information. You can create incentives for them to sign up as a group, such as T-shirts for organizers and a free barbeque for large groups. Clubs and Greek organizations are always looking for fellowship ideas, and this would be a new and exciting opportunity for them. Offer to have a representative from your club come to one of their meetings to talk about skydiving. Hopefully the clubs will do the advertising for you and work to get more members from their organization to sign up. Tandem Raffles This is an opportunity to combine fundraising with advertising. To raffle off a tandem your club either needs to purchase one or have one donated to you by your local dropzone (be sure to tell them that this is a great advertising opportunity). Create raffle tickets and hand them out to all of your members to sell. (In the past we have sold 1 for 2$ and 3 for 5$) For every raffle ticket sold, you should collect that person’s name, phone number, and email address. You can compile the email addresses at the end of the raffle and add them to your interest listserv or contact list. That way, people that you know are interested in skydiving will be kept up to date with any specials you run or meetings you have. Newspapers, Campus Mailings, TV/Radio/Podcasts, MySpace, Facebook, and Craigslist Depending on how popular your school’s newspaper is, it can be a valuable advertising source. Our school’s newspaper is widely read on campus, but the cost of taking out a small ad is ridiculous. It can be in your favor to contact the editor of your school paper to see if they would want to write a story about your club. You may want to wait for this until after a competition such as Collegiates or you could just have it be a general interest piece on skydiving as a sport. Either way, you will typically get at least ½ a page of print with pictures for free. Do not limit yourself to your school’s newspaper; contact your local and regional papers as well. They are often looking for stories and are eager to write about skydiving. If your school has a TV station, you may want to contact them to see if you may be allowed to submit a video about your club. These school stations are often looking for shows to fill their airspace and will be more than willing to incorporate a video that has already been created. If one of your members is good with video, get him or her to create a collection of clips of your members skydiving. This is often a cheaper alternative to buying a commercial. You can also contact your school’s radio station to see if they have opportunities for free public service announcements or have a DJ that would like to interview one of your members about skydiving. Our school is also delving into the world of Podcasting, yet another opportunity to have a public announcement. These social networking sites can be a cheap and easy and effective advertising avenue. Create a group on facebook and invite your club members, their friends and friends of their friends. Write on people’s walls and send out mass emails, anything to get the name out there. Facebook will even allow you to purchase ads. Create an account on Myspace for your club and start adding friends. You can include a blog about your events and a calendar of your up coming meetings. Leave comments on people’s profiles and join your school’s groups. Eventually people will start contacting you with questions about skydiving and the club. Also, you can post ads on craigslist advertising skydiving weekends on the events section. Campus Mailing Schools will sometimes provide you with a list of names and addresses for all of the students living on campus. You can create either a letter or postcard to be sent out campus wide. If you deliver the box of letters to your school’s post office they will typically mail them to the dorm mailboxes for free. The cost of printing the mailings may be expensive but you are insuring that everyone on campus knows your club exists and has your website address. Other School Dependent Forms of Advertising Advertising can take other forms depending on what your school allows. Some things that we have been able to do include: Small index-card sized advertisements that are placed in a holder on every table at the dining centers. Sandwich-board style markers that you can set up along a side walk. These can be cheaply made with supplies from Home Depot. Banners can be expensive if you get one that is professionally made, but you can cut costs if you have an artistic person in your club that can make one by hand. Our school has specific buildings that are used to hang banners, so you will want to check with your Student Union. Some schools also have a Crafts Center that will offer 'At-Cost' pricing for banners. Our school has glass display cases in the student activities building that can be used by clubs for advertising. You can include things such as flyers, skydiving pictures, parachutists, mini parachute men, small rig-style backpacks, t-shirts, altimeters, metals from competitions, etc. Since our display cases are locked, we do not have to worry about any of these items being stolen. Demonstration Skydives While schools may be very reluctant to allow your club to host a demo on campus, there is no better way to increase interest in skydiving than to have a live demonstration. You will have to contact your school administration to start a dialogue about the possibilities of hosting a demo. Even if you do not have PRO rated skydivers in your club, you will probably find willing participants at your dropzone. Your school may even work with you to set up a jump during a football game. This is outstanding publicity for a football program. Other companies in the area also like to get involved, so you can mention that, if they purchase a custom canopy, it will be flown into the season opener! |
