Re: AUGD: MUGs Going the Way of the Newton
Re: AUGD: MUGs Going the Way of the Newton
- Subject: Re: AUGD: MUGs Going the Way of the Newton
- From: Magnus Nystedt <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:16:16 +0400
You're a great inspiration to us all, David! We've been trying to do
everything with quality as well. Just because we're a non-profit user
group doesn't mean we should do things that look "cheap", I figure.
Just the other day we showed our newsletter to the guy who runs Adobe
here in the UAE and he was visibly very surprised and said
"but...but... it looks professional" ;-) We bought a laminator and
laminate all our membership cards. Members have to show them at
meetings and events. We put a barcode on the membership cards (for
their membership number) and we plan to get a barcode reader
eventually to be able to scan cards with. Whenever a retailer agrees
to give our members discounts we give them a sample membership card
so they know what it looks like. Most of them copy the cards when a
member makes a purchase and keeps records of their own. We've not
been able to offer our membership for free, but we'd love to at some
point. We're too small yet and it was increasingly hard to carry the
considerable costs ourselves. At least now we're getting a bit of a
contribution.
Something else we do is offer introduction to Mac OS X and iLife
courses. We charge about $70 for a three-hour course (on either
topic) which also includes a one-year membership (normally $40 on
it's own), and a course is $30 for members. We do this in cooperation
with a training institute so we have a nice lab with 15 iMacs all set
up and ready to go. We offer free courses to the institute's students
so they get something too. I wrote a registration system for our web
site for this purpose. We offer courses two Saturdays per month and
so far we've only done this one Saturday but it seems to be getting
increasingly popular. We made a deal with a local Apple dealer so
they bulk-bought a number of seats at a reduced price and then we
give them uniquely numbered coupons so they can give those to their
customers. When a customer registers they can enter the coupon number
on the site and then they get one course for free. That was also a
little PHP app...
One other thing perhaps worth mentioning is we do a thing called
MacNight together with another local Apple retailer. It basically
means that twice per month we spend some time in one of their stores,
put up our banners, encourage members to come hang out, and just talk
to customers and try to recruit them.
There are more things in the pipeline and I'll try to remember
telling you all about it when it happens. And please David, keep us
informed about your progress!
Magnus
--
Magnus Nystedt
President & Ambassador EmiratesMac User Group
Apple Product Professional
email@hidden
www.emiratesmac.com
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On Apr 26, 2007, at 10:23 AM, David Feng wrote:
A big reason our BeiMac user group was able to undergo spontaneous
combustion (otherwise known as explosive growth) in those recent
weeks (361 on March 23rd; 430 about a month later) was that we...
1. focused on people who didn't have a Mac but were interested in them
2. operated an iPod user group to keep on spreading the halo effect
3. moved our meetings into universities (BeiMac & BeiPod 4 U; 4
you, also 4 universities)
4. encouraged shops on good terms with us to carry application forms
5. opened up an online signup system
6. kept this thing free...
(We kind of like the last one; correction: the membership kind of
like the last one...)
Plus, we're in the new final frontiers -- the markets that have a
billion souls and counting (I'm sure this is getting old...).
We insist that quality cover over quantity, and to this extent,
we've been able to enhance the new membership envelopes every
member gets without exception at meetings when they sign up for the
user group. Even with that in place, though, we're looking at about
2 - 3 new members a day (with even more to come if they join us at
a regular meeting). Do the maths -- it's not going to be an
exaggeration if we hit the big 1K by March 2008.
Read otherwise: this is the kind of growth that the Zurich Cantonal
Bank has been able to pull off. (I've been their client back in
1997; one of their ads struck me deep: "Others grow by merging; we
grow through satisfaction."). And while we don't consider ourselves
sworn enemies of UBS-/Credit Suisse-esque growth ("growth by
gobbling others"), we do consider ourselves stickers of the
principle that we treat our members well. Here's why:
Back in 2006, I enrolled in a new readers' club at this bookstore
chain in Beijing. The way I was greeted made me feel insulted: the
application form was on a piece of thin A4 paper with a layout that
had "MS rushed design" written all over it. I was handed a
membership card which worked for only about a few weeks, and the
new "membership info sheet" was thin, tattered and looked like it
came through the printing press like a Jeep through the desert,
rather than an Audi on the Autobahn. In short, I felt insulted and
I felt I was being treated like (expletive deleted; approximate
meaning: animal + waste disposal). So I made up the pledge: DO NOT
TREAT OUR MEMBERS LIKE THAT!
Whole days are poured into designing our membership welcome
envelopes. We also get downright environmentally friendly,
supplementing the pre-printed ones with updated information rather
than sending the old ones to the dumpster. We take hours off
analyzing just how to do application forms right; we analyze
various application forms from mainland China, Taiwan, Switzerland,
Hong Kong, and see which bits look user-friendly and which look
user-fiendly (sorry if the play on that word didn't turn out that
well).
I guess this is standard behavior for a president who's a Swiss
citizen... ;-)
David Feng
BeiMac
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