Swag and Giveaways - How can you excite people to participate?
Share your best tips here. This is a living document meant to be added to by user group leaders to spread knowledge so go ahead and add your ideas here.
Swag Strategies
National Instruments has LabVIEW T-shirts, NI mugs, pens, mouse pads, etc, to give away. Work up a swag strategy for your user group that helps you obtain your goals. Most user group leaders leverage swag for two main purposes: participation and presenting.
Participation:
User group leaders can use swag as a reward to achieve a number of related activities. Some leaders will do a raffle - each attendee receives a ticket and a drawing at the end determines the winner. You can get creative with this type of activity, some leaders have written a LabVIEW VI to randomly select raffle winner.
While raffles are fun, the scenario listed here doesn't have the users do anything special to get included in the drawing. Instead, user group leaders could do something like a membership drive i.e. bring 5 new friends to the user group meeting and you receive a prize or perhaps the name goes into a raffle. Or, join the Community Page and your name is entered in the raffle. Maybe the activity is just answering questions or helping with the demo but the user have to do something special to be rewarded. Participatory prizes are normally smaller (i.e. screwdrivers, pocket protectors, posters).
Since presenting is normally seen as the activity that user group leaders value the most and involves the most time invested by the attendee presenting prizes (i.e. t-shirts, mugs, software) should be given in this case.
Presenting:
Make sure everyone knows that you have some really cool swag for those who are willing to present. User group leaders can put it in an email to the groups (i.e. "Did you know that you could get some awesome prizes for presenting? If you are interested then let me know”). You should request volunteers to present at meetings and be certain presentation opportunities are mentioned on your user group community page, as well.
When you do give a presenter a prize, do it in front of everyone so they can see what they get for the extra effort and also thank them for helping out. By making a large display of giving the gift and emphasizing how much you appreciate them taking the time and effort to present to the group, hopefully others will be encouraged to present also. This has a side effect in that people psychologically associate the prize with more worth as it is seen as being valued within the community.
Free Swag
- There are many tech publishers that have user group programs that give away free or discounted technical books. This is a nice goodie to offer your members as well.
