An everlasting flyer...

Category: Marketing

Published: 12/09/2008 06:07 a.m.

I came across a post today from Church Marketing Sucks about spending $5,000. In it, they talk about two ideas for marketing handouts. The first is handing out flyers or stickers that point you to a website. The second is to stamp your website on a $1 bill and hand that out to someone in need.

CARPOOL does many awareness tables across campus, and most of the time they hand out flyers. If you haven't spent much time on a college campus, I let you in on a secret. Handing out a flyer is almost the equivalent of asking people to throw something away for you. I would guess that at least 60% of flyers end up in the trashcan nearest to the handout site. It is just not an effective way to market. It is cheap and easy, and it gives you something tangible to give to someone. Sometimes people attach candy or other objects to the flyers which ups their value to the general public a bit, but overall, flyers are not that successful.

But, what if you took a small portion of the budget to try out the second idea. Let's say you took 100 $1 bills and wrote "This bill donated to the public by carpool.tamu.edu . Spend/donate as you see fit." on the bill. You could hand them out in small numbers throughout the day. I would guess that word would spread and you may get extra attention through word of mouth. You could selectively give them out to people who let you talk to them for 30 seconds. "Here is a dollar if you let me give my pitch for 30 seconds". For most college students, their time is easily worth that. You could draw extra attention by being known as the group that gives out cash.

But these day-of benefits are far outweighed by the long term bonuses. It is almost guaranteed that no one will throw away your flyer now because it has an absolute value. It is even better than a coupon for a free something-or-other. You are giving freedom to people. You could even recommend that they donate the dollar to somewhere of their choice (even back to the organization). As the dollars are being spent/donated, they will continue to exist as flyers. Your reach is now greatly expanded and will only continue to grow. And by putting a website on the bill, you can drive attention back to you.

The icing on the cake would be to put up a wheresgeorge style of tracking to your site, where people who were given bills (or got them eventually) could post where they spent/donated their dollar, and where they are. This would be a great way to track even a small portion of the reach of these dollars.

This idea is going to be known as "Operation Everlasting Flyer". I think this would be worth $100 of my money to test out, and I think I know the perfect place to do so. Hopefully I will report back with updates.

If you have any ideas on improving upon this, or if you have done this before, please let me know in the comments.