As one of the street team leaders for the newspaper The College Times, I am often asked to make decisions and provide input. As a leader I am responsible for my team members, and also responsible to come up with ideas and make decisions on how to maximize the distribution of the paper, as well as out promotional items. A few weeks ago, we were presented with a problem that our distribution on the campus at Arizona State University was well behind that of the different community colleges around the valley. Although ASU as more students, its tough to get the papers out, because the students seem to always be in passing, and often turn down the paper. It was decided that we needed to have a meeting between the leaders on the street team. While brainstorming, I came up with an idea to put the paper, along with a few of the different promotional items that we are giving away during that time in plastic bag, and hand out the whole bag. I knew that this idea worked, because we had been doing it at promotional events such as concerts, movie premiers and special events. The idea is that if someone sees the bag, they will associate that they are getting something for free with it, plus the paper is in the bag, and the person is forced to notice it. There were however, some problems with this idea.
One problem is cost. To provide bags and promotional items for each bag is fairly expensive. Also the labor cost involved would be pricey to. Someone would have to be paid to make the bags ready. We brainstormed some other ideas, but none of them seemed to really click logistically. After putting all the ideas on paper, we made the decision that the bag idea would be the one we would go with.
We decided that the office administrative assistant would be in charge of making the bags, and she had no problem with doing it, the next step was getting the material.
We stuffed the bags with an issue of the college times, as well as several coupons to different bars, movie passes and other promotional items.
