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For three years, I have been in China teaching Swing Dancing. Now I'm wandering yet again...
2005-10-11
New party
We have an opportunity to hold a new, large party. A big new venue has opened up which can hold 300-400 people. I'm going to submit a proposal for it tomorrow. I'm thinking about the plan today and making items that we'll need, and I'm also trying to think of the 'goal' of the event; what's most important.
Done correctly, this could be a great boost for swing dancing.
A friend of mine out here teaches ballroom dancing. He's also a foreigner, white male, and as far as I know the only other person like myself doing this in Shanghai. He's a good friend of mine, and we've worked together on several movies, and he helps in many ways to make the swing dance scene stronger. His own efforts to get a ballroom thing going have been hitting hard times lately. I tell him, everything runs in cycles. You'll have periods of high activity, followed by low activity, and sometimes there's no reason for it. But lately he's not been doing well, and his student attendance has been faltering.
By comparison, my own group has been doing well. We get about 20 regulars and and equal amount of drop ins each Sunday. That's still awfully small considering. There's several factors to getting a group like this going, which are:
* Getting people to come to the dances
* Getting them to join the dance classes
* Having them continue to remain in the group for a long time.
On the first and second items we've been strong enough. We are having a decent problem with retention, the third item. Everything goes well for a while, then at about two months most people lose interest and drop out. It's OK if they don't re-enroll in class; but they also drop out of the social scene. Some do not, but over half do, and this is a problem. If we could only retain 10% of the people who have ever joined a class, we'd have several hundred people.
Which gets me to thinking (as always). The weakest part of the long-term plan right now is retention. That means the focus should go towards intermediate and advanced classes, as well as social functions to make the group work as a community. This I'll admit has not taken up too much of my efforts recently. Perhaps time to focus more upon it.
Lots on the party. More to come if the pitch goes well tomorrow.
On the personal side, I took a small vacation about a week ago. I feel better since then. While I was still in China, I got out of Shanghai for a while and did some good things over my break, also spending very little money in the process (a great plus!).
Ooops, almost forgot to mention: I've filmed dancing in three movies. Two are still in production, but one of them has gone to theatres. It's called "Everlasting Regret". (www.everlasting-regret.com). I did some tango dancing in it. This is the movie we shot for 26 hours. In the end, you can see me as a blur in the dance scene. However, you can only see this blur if you get the DVD and press frame-by-frame advance during the dance scenes. Furthermore, you can only see my left ear and profile in one blurry moment, then a moment later, you can see the blurry image of my right ear and profile. You can't see my eyes or nose, so if you are very familiar with my ears then please do look out for them.
I'm also present as 'blurry white man laughing while sitting at table while stars walk by." No, don't scan the credits for it; you won't find them. But it was a cool experience.
I should not have done it, but I did an internet search on my old girlfriend you-know-who. She's married now and apparently working on some consulting group. Looks good. This lookup stirred up a few old memories in me. If you feel stongly about a person at one time, you may hold a portion of this with you forever. I do, I must admit. However it's manageble now. She looked good in the photos, and although there's not much information to go by, she seems to be doing alright. We're not in touch. I think it's best that way. Each contact would just stir up the old memories, and why do that any more than you have to.
So, I'm procrastinating on putting this dance party proposal together. I don't know why, exactly. I suppose there's a few very, very large variables which are up to me to define. And should I approach the project in the wrong way (such as setting the entrance fee too high), it will fail to achieve its maximum result. I guess that's what I'm looking for; maximum result. So, if I'm to get that, how would I define it? How about another list:
A) Maximum total attendance
B) Maximum swing dancer attendance
C) Highest quality of swing dancing
D) Highest quality impression of people watching event
E) Greatest possible publicity for swing dancing
F) Greatest possible monetary gain on the day
G) Greatest possble recruitment of new dancers
The theme and feeling and decor of the party have already been established, as has most of the entertainment and the swing dancing ideas throughout. For the moment, I'm not worried about developing these. What I need to do now is to develop the business plan for how to handle this event. I suppose I'd have to take each of these items A-G and rank them in terms of importance. Some items (such as maximum attendance) will obviously have an effect on other items, so this must be taken into account on the ranking. So, then I'd say:
#1) A #2) B #3) F #4) G #5) D #6) C #7) E
Ok, so that has surprised me a little. I figured publicity would have been ranked higher, but I think I've realized something about publicity. It doesn't matter unless it translates into something else. Also, I put recruitment higher than I'd have thought if you asked me. Usually recruitment has not been a high priority at our events. But I think we need to do it this time as one of the main focuses. Of course, monetary gain is important. Vital, really. Got to get in the black or this project will fizzle out.
So, with that in mind, I'll hammer out a little plan.
More to come
-J
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