Like all visitors to the Listening to the Social Entrepreneur conference, my pack included a leaflet from a university research centre. Today it popped up on the top of my in-tray while I was making a concerted effort to clear it. The leaflet is a description of the research centre, but it included a web address, so I visited that website. It contained essentially the same information and nothing else. What was the point of that? I already had their contact details in the attendee list. How much did these leaflets cost?
In general, it’s a little disappointing when you get a “null pointer” from a private company, but it’s particularly annoying from a university. University mistakes like “technology transfer programmes” (that stop software becoming free software available to social enterprises) are justified by a need to get more money – but clearly this particular university has money to waste. How about others?
If there was a way to subscribe to email or blog news of their research publications, I probably would have subscribed. Instead, I’ve just ranted here (without rewarding them with a link) and now I’m going to recycle the flier. I’ll probably have forgotten the three-letter acronym by next week. It’s simply bad marketing. It’s paper spam. Please, if you are putting things into conference handout packs, ask yourself why? What are you hoping to get out of it? How are you going to measure its success?
1 comment so far
1 Ambrose // Oct 29, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Writing as someone whose job is (in part) to produce leaflets, I would make a random guess: There’s screw-up by that university’s management.
When people are asked to produce leaflets, they have certain expectations (I hope): one is that the leaflet would contain a useful amount (but not all) information, and another is that there is a way to “get more information” (usually meaning a telephone number and a web site address).
Very often (where I work at least), one, management might think that you can put everything into a leaflet, so that they would eventually force you to put more than necessary on the piece of paper; and two, management would tell you NOT to put up any more information on the web site (and maybe even take down information if you already got them put up). I think this (esp. the second one) is stupid and I frankly don’t have any idea how these people think, but there’s nothing you can do about it.