Wireless Toronto

At the April 2007 volunteer meeting a lot of 'marketing' related points came up, not least stickers. Patrick volunteered to take a look at how Wireless Toronto promotes itself and what we need to improve. Here are some thoughts:

There are a couple of likely goals for the promotion of Wireless Toronto:

1) Get more venues
2) Get more users
3) Raise money, through donations of sponsorships
4) Raise the profile/influence of the group, get known as an important stakeholder in things WiFi in Toronto

We've been talking about stickers forever, as a way of letting people know a venue if a WT hotspot. Progress has been made, but we still don't have stickers for all our venues (or even close). We need them!

• Apr 10: I ordered adhesive vinyl, which I'll use to make stickers on my printer. Hopefully it'll be here by the 16th. [Gabe]

We have a http://wiki.wirelesstoronto.ca/pitch_kit in PDF form. A new brochure with map might be in order and/or postcards, to leave at venues and other relevant locations to spread the word.

• Apr 15: Dory just designed a new brochure: april07wtbrochure-1.pdf Note that it looks funny in Apple Preview; use Adobe Reader.
• Apr 16: Revised brochure: april07wtbrochure.pdf
• NOTE (Nov 25): The most up-to-date brochure will always be available at http://wirelesstoronto.ca/brochure.pdf

The site gets plenty of traffic, around 100 visitors per day. The information/design of the site has barely changed since launch in 2005, a revamp is overdue. The blog on the site attracts, but is only updated sporadically. It would be good if we could work out a way to keep the blog fresh, without too much work.

To date we've sent out 2 (?) emails to our entire subscriber list. There are plans to send another before the TTG party in May.

The portal pages are a missed opportunity for a little, lightweight promotion. A bit of a blurb on the how/why of Wireless Toronto and a donation button seems like the way to go.

We do have a Paypal account set up for donations, but the receipts to date have been pretty minimal. Making the donation option more visible (but not pushy) and telling a story about why people should donate might help.

We have (I think) a bunch of the WT buttons left. Plus a few T-shirts (6ish). Edward suggested that printing some extra t-shirts for the TTG party could be a good idea. Another thought is that we could use buttons/t-shirts as a fund-raising lever, either through online sale (assuming the profit was high enough to make it worth the hassle) or as an inducement to donate (donate $40 and get a t-shirt, $20 gets a set of buttons).