SBE is seeing the first products of a new marketing committee.
The group formed during the 2007 national meeting. Conrad Trautmann is chair; members include Tom Ray, Vincent Lopez, Jim Leifer and Gary Kline.
“The primary goal of the committee is to increase the visibility of the society beyond the existing member base,” Trautmann wrote in a new e-mail newsletter that SBE now produces.
“Secondary goals include fostering better communication amongst our members, assisting with our recruiting efforts to increase membership, helping to write and review press release information and to assist the national office with our advertising efforts.”
The “SBE-news” e-mail itself is the first result. “The logistics of sending out a national e-mail are more than you might think. We had to find a vendor to send the e-mails to over 4,000 email addresses,” Trautmann wrote to members.
“We needed someone who could send that many e-mails without getting caught in every spam filter. We had to come up with a schedule for the year and decide what content would go in each one. And we needed to be creative on ways to cover the distribution expenses with advertising, so there would be no additional expenses to members.”
The newsletter will be distributed twice each month and provide info about SBE programs, activities and current events. SBE says the newsletter also offers the opportunity for the society’s sustaining members to advertise to a targeted audience of broadcast engineers at a reasonable cost.
The SBE also published the print newsletter “The Signal” six times per year and in 2007 launched the SBE Roundtable, an e-mail forum.
