Have a Rockin' College Skydiving Club (a how to manual)

[aubsmell 0]

I wrote this letter to a friend of mine the other day, and thought it would be good to post in up here in order to help some of you who are in college out.

There is a ton more to having a college skydiving club than what is in this letter, but this is a good start.

1) Organize a weekly meeting at a bar/restaurant popular with students:
a. Get with the owner / manager and get drink / food specials for a certain time period on a slower night of the week for him. They are down with stuff like this, if you consistantly bring in 10 - 30 people every week, he'll give you dollar domestics or $5 pitchers and some cheep menu items to keep your weekly return business, Shop around for the best deal at the coolest place, as this will help you attract members to the club meetings.
a1. Advertise this night and discount pricing to the student body.
b. See if you can get it at a sports bar that has a big TV, a projector screen will be best, have skydiving videos playing (cool ones not your own) only play this shit for like 2 hours, otherwise people will get board.
c. Have people sign up for club membership at these meetings, give them something like a membership card, and a T-shirt, make the cost low, like $20 and have a treasurer take the cost of the T-shirt out of that, and the rest of the money goes for your once per semester party, on campus, not at the DZ (recruiting fresh blood with parties works)

2) Get a booth at the weekly student bazaar / flea market. All grungy hippy universities have one, where do you think everybody buys that greatful dead black light poster. These are usually held at a high traffic area.
a. Organize with your schools audio video department to supply your space with a TV / DVD combo, and play skydiving videos on it.
b. Print up flyers advertising your clubs meeting night and the drink / food specials that the place your having it offers club members.
c. Oh, this should have been first, you usually have to reserve a spot in this with student services, usually they will wave the fee if there is one because you are an official school club.
d. Print Cool ASS club T-shirts, not lame ass club t-shirts, I repeat, NOT LAME ASS CLUB T-SHIRTS.
e. Sell these T-shirts to Wuffo's at your psudo hippy stand. Give them to club members.
f. Have little discount vouchers that you can pass out (post cards work best), I can help you get these printed if you like $150 for 5000. (try to get the DZO) to pay for this. Have one side promoting the university skydiving club, and the other side promoting your dropzone and the tandem / aff discount they will get with the card, and only with the card.
f1. Have your DZO give you or your club credit for every single one of these cards that gets turned in for the discount. My DZO gave me $10, I'd push for a jump ticket for every tandem or AFF you bring.
g. Have a sign up sheet for the students to sign and harvest their email addresses. Sign everyone up EVERYONE!!!!
g1. use these addresses for a email news group, like yahoo groups, and add every email address you get to this. Get some nerdier member of the club to do a weekly update with any info, like names of students who did tandems, or AFFs or got their A, B, C, D licenses, add a couple of ripped off pictures from a good boogie somewhere, maybe one that one of the clubbers went to. Either way, send this out every week to all list members, do it about 2 days before the club meeting, the primary goal is to get people to show up to that.

3) Bars and Nightclubs: These are keys to getting tandem participation, and a great way you can earn money for yourself or your club, and promote club membership. Once again organize a deal with your DZO so that you get some type of credit / cash for each tandem referral that you bring the DZ. The best way would be some sort of discount card that they must present at the time of their tandem / aff. Just getting drunk people to make a pact to go to the DZ and do a tandem is a pretty easy operation, to get them to follow through is a little tougher. But if you always have a few of the discount cards in your back pocket, and you give out 5 per night , and you can get a few members of your club to do the same, soon you will have given out tons of these mother fers.
a.Approach club managers about cross promotion deals. Most college bars are usually 18 and up, and the 21 year olds usually get an one of those little sticky arm bands. A good avenue of promotion is to talk to the bar managers of the good bars on specific nights, like if some place has a good nickel beer tuesday, say that you'll supply the bar with bands for that night that offers their customers a discount on a skydive, and promotes something for them. These bands are usually about $100-$150 for 1000. Also offer the bar owner 1 free tandem for to give his employee of the month or whatever for this. In my experience they will always go for this. Of course you have to work this out with your DZO as well, they will usually go for this too, you can usually even get them to suck up the cost of the bands. Don't do this with every club, but the MOST popular ones, and just on their best nights. (this also gives you access to bands for their most popular night, that you can jack from the box before giving it to the bar manager, so you can get all of your under 21 club members banded, once they get in)
b. Depending on how many free tandems you can get your DZO to comp, you can do all sorts of cross promotion with bars, and night clubs, like if they have a bikini contest, you can give a tandem for the winner (tandem masters will love you for that), You can organize a really deep discount for the entire staff (like 1/2 price tandems) if they will put a banner up for the DZ or a framed add in the bathroom.

4) Fraternity and Sororities:
a. Once per semester you should get some members of your club who are members of greek organizations to go from house to house at the dinner hour, and make a pitch for the club, and for a Fraternity / Sorority discount for a group of X or more. Play on the team building and bonding thing. Also get them to let you put up an advertisement on their bulletin board, and while you are speaking about your pitch, pass around a email sign up sheet to harvest more addresses for your news group, just pitch it as, "wright down your email if you are interested in more information on skydiving, and the skydiving club"
b. If you do get a big group of some campus organization to come and do a jump, make sure you get pictures and write a little something for your school paper, school news papers are always starving for any kind of story, and they'll most likely print whatever pictures you give them, always give them one of one of the students in freefall, and then one of the group on the ground.

5) Campus Radio stations, and local radio stations:
a. We both know that no one listens to the college radio station, and those goth mongers usually have nothing to say anyway. Usually they let University clubs advertise for free, so use it if you can, if it's not free, bribe them, give their staffers cheep tandems, or free, I usually wouldn't go free with these guys, because you don't get much mileage out of them. But you can always weasel yourself into the box there, and there may be some stoner in his dorm room somewhere listening.
b. Real radio stations, the DJ's at radio stations don't get paid squat. They live of perks. No pay, but tons of perks, and if you can work a deal to give away a couple of skydives for some lame contests they can come up with, you'll get lots of mileage out of it. It's good for once a year or so. If you can get the DJ's to jump, you may get a ton of free publicity out of it, because just like you and me, when they do their first skydive they will be talking about it for at least a week or so. Especially if they try to do something cool, like surprise one of their ilk with it.

6) Football games / Basket ball (what ever your school is good at. Set up a your hippy exchange table before the games too. Tailgate with your skydiving club members. Sell your cool assed t-shirts, and harvest email addresses.

7) General Advertisement:
a. Paper the dorms with flyers / discount vouchers
b. The gym
c. The mail boxes at all the college apt complexes
d. all the campus bulletin boards.
e. Get to all of your classes a little early on club meeting days, and write the meeting time and place and organized discount on the chalk / dry erase board prior to class. The teacher will almost always erase it when he or she starts to use the board, but they will just bring all eyes to the advertisment, do it EVERY week, in EVERY class, and enlist other club members to do the same.

Give me a call if you have any more questions, but if you do all of these things, and lead your fellow skydiving students to embrace the same principals of marketing your club, within just the span of a semester or two you will be the biggest club on campus.


This assuming that you already have a club, if not step one would be registering your organization with the studend clubs council, or what ever your university has that is like an SCC.

feel free to hit me with any questions, or add to this for postarity.

Aubrey

"Those who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it"

[pincheck 0]

you can always really on uni students to know where the cheapest beer/food entertainment is

Billy-Sonic Haggis Flickr-Fun

[HellaMannn 0]

thanks for the article...got some really good ideas in there. we are working on a bunch of them here at University of Georgia. I like the meetings at a restaurant or bar though, we haven't thought of that yet.

Alex
UGA Skydiving Club

[bob.dino 1]

'Twardo's thoughts.

[BGill 0]

i appreciate you taking the time to write all of this down aubrey. i'll call you later in the week so we can talk more about it.

really really good ideas dude

[psipike02 0]

This is exactly what me and some other skydivers up here at Univ. of Michigan need to get started......thanks!

Puttin' some stank on it.

----Hellfish #707----

[VTcnix 0]

I think that this was an excellent post for ideas on skydiving club success.
I'm the current president of the Skydiving Club of Virginia Tech and in the past couple of years we've been implementing alot of different ideas and have seen our club membership skyrocket.
1. I think a website is VERY important. It is a very easy thing to advertise and a great way for whuffos to get information on skydiving and the club with minimal effort from the club. We were able to get an easy-to-remember name from a masking service and use the internet space the school gives us. Our website is a work in progress but it is up at www.skydiveVT.com. There are alot of cool college club websites out there.
2. We have 2 listserves. One we put anyone who has expressed interest in making a jump and to which we only send out general information about upcoming meetings. The other is for members and anyone wanting to be on it, alot of trash talking, jokes, pictures etc are sent over but its fun and a great way for club members to bond with each other.
3. We also have been meeting at a bar which I think is a great thing because it's casual as skydiving club meetings should be.. I haven't asked for discounts but am going to look into that
4. We hold seperate interest meetings,.. that way we can go over the basics of the club and of making your first jump without boring our experienced members.
5. We hold weekly "conference nights" basically dinner at a different person's house each week and everyone chips in $5. It's always good fun and gives the on-campus kids a home cooked meal
6. We offer members who go through AFF free coaching once they are on coaching status. We are able to do this because we have club members who are certified coaches who are willing to give back to the club... it really cuts down on the cost to the student.. and it's been a good thing because we have had members go through our coaching program and now are giving coach jumps themselves
7. Our club has 3 rigs that we have acquired over the years (partly with help from funding from the school) These rigs are available to our members at a cost of $5 /jump (this is about $25 less than the DZ charges) to cover the maintenance costs on the rig. This helps alot with lowering the cost for new jumpers.
8. We offer free packing classes. Everyone's got to learn to pack, and so we get people together for packing classes during the week.
9. Trips!!! I think this is so important for forming bonds between your club members.. this year we've made a trip down to the farm for one of their $129 weekends, gone to Bridge Day in WV and upcoming we will be going to Westpoints Halloween Boogie and down to Florida for Collegiates. These trips are always fun and cramming 6 skydivers into a small car really cuts the costs of gas.
10. We held our back to school boogie for the first time this year and it was a beautiful thing. A chance for all our members and alumni to get together and start the year off right. We held events like 4way scrambles, hit-and-chug and all tech 8 ways.
11.Tandem Raffle- we did this a couple of years ago,.. had the dropzone donate a tandem, made raffle cards and gave them to members to sell @ like 2$ a peice and kept that going for about 2-3 weeks. It was a great way to get our name out and we also used the list of people who signed up for raffle tickets to put on our whuffo contact list. We ended up bringing out alot of tandems from this and made like $500.
12. FUNDING FROM YOUR SCHOOL!!!! I put this last because i think its one of the most important. This is an avenue you MUST check out. Our school and I assume most schools have money they allocate to clubs. We have to go through an annual funding process where we request money for certain things and then we have a hearing and the school decides how much money to allocate us. The school loves us because we are such a novel club. In the past we've gotten money for new gear, gear maintenance (ex: cypresses, repacks etc), USPA dues (a real hassle), money to go to Collegiates down in Florida etc... Because of this money we are able to offer our members the opportunity to compete down in florida for next to nothing... We just started doing this a couple of years ago and have been amazed by the receptiveness of the school...
Anyway that was all I could think of right now,.. if you want to contact me my email is cnix@vt.edu
Also wanted to know if anyone's been able to do a demo @ their school,.. Vah Tech's not too enthusiastic about it.
Cheers,
Christie
President of the Skydiving Club of Virginia Tech
Fallatio # 4
Infructus #2

[Andy9o8 2]

These are excellent posts. I got started in a college skydiving club back in the 70s, so this brings back warm memories.

Just one cautionary note, if your club is in any way a school-sponsored club, or if you use any school or campus facilities: I'm pretty sure the drinking age in every state now is 21 (it was 18 in NY back in my day, suckers ), so most undergrads are too young to drink. So if you meet at a public place like a bar, make sure it's a restaurant type in which people of all ages are allowed to enter. There's always some dickhead in the college's administration or Board of Directors ready to make trouble for you if you're not careful (in public).

[aubsmell 0]

Super sweet.. Thanks, I think this thread can help all kinds of people out for future generations of of drunken college students all over America - nay - all over the world.

Also, if you have a college boogie let me know, As one of the Managers here at Aerodyne they have given me great powers over the distribution of pull up cords and boogie goodies. I can hook you up.

Also because of the soft spot in my heart (and my head), I give fat deals to college clubs for gear owned and shared by the club. So if you guys ever need anything let me know.

Keep the communication open on this and the good ideas coming...!!!!


Aubrey

"Those who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it"