The Dance Ambassadors Project
Dance organizers. Has this ever happened to you?
A newcomer attends your dance - tells you it was great and that he or she had a wonderful time - and you never see the person again.
Most dances have three or four or five or more newcomers in attendance at every event. If a small percentage of them - say ten percent or even five percent - became regular dancers coming to half our dances or more - organizers would all be out looking for bigger halls.
In reality, only a tiny, almost infinitesimal percentage of our newcomers become "regulars." Why? What can we do about it?
The Dance Ambassadors project is an action-oriented research project designed to provide actionable answers to those questions. By "action-oriented" we mean that our primary focus is to find information what we can actually use to communicate more effectively and take action to turn more "newcomers" into "regulars."
The "big idea" of this approach to recruiting new dancers and building attendance is that there is no "big idea." If there was a single, silver bullet that would work every time - the law of averages says someone would have discovered it by now.
Reality says we live in a complex age when a vast variety of competing interests vie for people's time. Business interests spend millions (billions?) seeking unique selling propositions that will pick off new customers and increase their sales. Who are we to think - even for an instant - that we can discover a way to accomplish a goal they (private enterprise) would pay millions for?
Our mission is to discover how, as smart, creative, independent thinkers working in the age of the Internet, we can work together, gain valuable insight into the challenges we all face and say: "Yes, we can."