Yesterday, with a very heavy heart, we decided to pull the plug on the remaining tour dates of our Social Media + Family tour for October, which included a Dads Who Lunch event in each city. Ultimately, we were not getting the interest from our community, nor the support we needed to pull the events off with sufficient participation to make the amount of time and money invested worthwhile. While the events held in September themselves were high quality successes in terms of content and experience, they just weren't providing the return on investment, or return on attention that we sought. The non-stop travel schedule was also extremely wearing on me physically and emotionally, which also took time away from other activities.
So yesterday afternoon, we sent the following email to the 100 or so people who had registered for the upcoming events on Eventbrite. The letter should speak for itself, but I will be writing more about this late tomorrow/early Monday with more details on our findings/feelings.
Good evening,
I am very sorry to inform you that we are having to reschedule the remainder of our Social Media + Family tour as well as the Dads Who Lunch events taking place in the following cities: New York – Denver – Seattle – Detroit – Cleveland – Washington – Baltimore – Boston.
Unfortunately, we have not seen the sort of attendance for these events we normally see at our monthly meetings in each of the cities. There are a number of reasons we believe this is happening which we will be writing about in more detail on Monday.
We believe from conversations with some of our local leaders in the tour cities that our community is primarily interested in professional topics that help advance their careers or grow their business, as opposed to topics that affect their personal lives. Many people also complained about the $10 fee we charged for the educational insights, the open bar and the food, even though this was being completely donated to http://www.LetsCureCP.org/ but the bottom line is we made several wrong assumptions which we are unable to correct for while doing so many events right after one another.
The other issue here is that we did not feel we were providing the sponsor Chevy Cruze with the sort of value that they have paid us to deliver. They have been very gracious and understanding in this matter, recognizing the herculean effort put forth by our national Social Media Club team, and are on board with the idea that we are merely postponing, not canceling these events.
This has been a very difficult decision for me personally, as it is one of our first major media literacy initiatives we have undertaken, which is one of the primary missions of Social Media Club. This is especially the case when we read the news about the impact social media is having on the lives of families with children in school like the Rutgers situation and in so many other incidents we read about in the daily news cycle.
The events we have hosted have been fantastic as you can see yourself from the videos we captured of each event http://vimeo.com/socialmediaclub. So we are very hopeful that we will be able to create partnerships with other organizations and mainstream media outlets who can help us bring more parents to these events in the late winter/early spring and produce the positive impact at a more appropriate scale.
Please keep an eye out for the post, and for a summary of our lessons learned so far on Social Media + Family next week. We will also be asking for feedback on what we can do differently and your thoughts about why you did register and why maybe some of the people you may have invited didn’t. In fact, please do feel free to email me with your thoughts as well, but please give me some time to respond since I am going to be very busy the next few days.
With love and respect,
Chris Heuer
Founder/Chairman, Social Media Club
Host/Moderator, Social Media + Family
