On Fri, Sep 28, 2007 at 01:21:33AM +1000, njh wrote:

On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, Ted Gould wrote:

...

I submitted the application for us to have a booth at SCALE again this year. I was thinking that perhaps we'd have a give away like stickers, something that says "Inkscape" on it. I figured we could do the design via contest. Anyway, that's really background, what I want to ask is how the stickers should (if they were approved by the board) be distributed:

-- Give aways -- Sell for a $1 donation

I'm kinda thinking give aways, but it seems like a case where we could make some money and not spend money on people who really don't care, they just want something for free.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Just been at a similar show (ditto mental). People like to pick up things for free without even looking at them. Putting a cost on them says firstly that you care about them and secondly that they are not advertising (which is of course not actually true, but that seems to be perception). I would charge for them. Ideally charge as close as possible to cost price. You might also get some ubuntu CDs with inkscape on them to sell for a few $ for people who want to try it.

Finally, make some business cards for inkscape to give out and put important URLs on it (including inkscape.org, openclipart.org and the mailing list page). Otherwise you will spend the day writing them out.

Tri-fold brochures are another idea; people have to unfold them to look at them, so it at least ensures a minimal amount of interaction.

Bryce

On Fri, 28 Sep 2007 06:25:12 +1000 (EST), njh <njh@...19...> wrote:

...

Tri-fold brochures are another idea; people have to unfold them to look at them, so it at least ensures a minimal amount of interaction.

Oh, we're inkscapers! We could make origami brochures. Print them such that you have to fold them to read them, then you don't have to fold them yourself :)

Origami brocures might be better suited to Laidout (http://www.laidout.org/).

-mental

On Fri, 2007-09-28 at 01:21 +1000, njh wrote:

Just been at a similar show (ditto mental). People like to pick up things for free without even looking at them. Putting a cost on them says firstly that you care about them and secondly that they are not advertising (which is of course not actually true, but that seems to be perception). I would charge for them. Ideally charge as close as possible to cost price. You might also get some ubuntu CDs with inkscape on them to sell for a few $ for people who want to try it.

Usually at SCALE the major distro folks are there handing out CDs, so I don't think it's really a useful thing for us.

I was thinking $1 just because it'd be easy to count and keep track of. I'm not sure how much stickers would cost, but if we could sell them for a quarter that'd work too. I just wanted to reduce the accounting effort.

Finally, make some business cards for inkscape to give out and put important URLs on it (including inkscape.org, openclipart.org and the mailing list page). Otherwise you will spend the day writing them out.

Yeah. Last year we put them on the backdrop, I think a handout might be good there. That was really one of my goals with the stickers.

On Thu, 2007-09-27 at 11:09 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:

Tri-fold brochures are another idea; people have to unfold them to look at them, so it at least ensures a minimal amount of interaction.

I like trifolds, but I don't know that we wouldn't have to print them in high color to make Inkscape look good -- and that starts to get expensive.

My other concern is that I don't want to appear like the .com booths that are there, I'd rather look like a .org. While this could seem as a negative, I do think it's a positive as it controls expectations and makes us more approachable. I don't want people to think "we're selling something" more "we're willing to help." I think stickers are kooky enough to make a distinction.

So, it seems in general, people seem supportive of the idea. I'll ask Gareth (the SCALE guy) when we'll know on the booth. I'd hate to have stickers and no booth :)

--Ted