Join the Impact Fan Club and receive the latest news and exclusive specials: Enter your email address below and click "Hit it."
(We don't trade email addresses with anyone. Ever.)
Caltopia, Day 1
posted by Cheshire on Sun, Aug 24, 2008
in News
We had our first booth at Caltopia this weekend, and wow, what a haul. Was it the red vinyl booth? (Thanks, Brandina and Vlad!) Was it the Nerf dart game board? (Thanks, Josh and Jon!). Was it the booth babes? (Thanks, Marissa, Miyuki, and Seth!) Was it a meeeeeellion UC Berkeley students out for anything free they could get their hands on?
Who knows, but man did we get a lot of sign-ups for the mailing list. Also, it should be mentioned, not a few dubious looks from some people wanting to know what the hell we were doing with postcards that read "Ching Chong Chinaman." "I swear to God, we're not racist!" I told the dubious lookers. They laughed, a little relieved, I think.
And by "a lot of sign-ups," I mean five times what we get at festivals like the Solano Stroll and How Berkeley Can You Be. Today we added 500+ people. Considering we started with 1600 or so, that is a huge boost.
I always get asked, "Don't you get a lot of Cal students at Impact?" The answer is, not as many as you'd think, given our proximity to the campus and low ticket prices. We have a very hard time marketing on campus. It's not worthwhile to flyer on campus, as the flyers are covered almost as soon as they're up. We could do a lot more to partner with the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, but we haven't so far. Other than that, we're competing against huge corporations who spend a lot of coin courting the college crowd.
But Caltopia is kind of a great equalizer. We have the same-size booth as Southwest Airlines. And at times, our booth had a crowd almost as big as theirs. People had fun with the Nerf dart gun (thanks, Melissa!) -- so much so that by the end of the day we'd run out of most of our prizes, not to mention our sign-up sheets! I've never seen response that huge.
It was great but exhausting -- and tomorrow we get to do it all over again.
I wonder whether the other festivals are going to be bigger than usual for us. It's quite a year we're about to get underway...