5A-7 Other New Business for Discussion?

[Lloyd Lombard]

Marketing/Promotion Plan for Chess in Canada at the local, provincial and national level - One of our members formed a chess club in 2014 in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. In 2015 until now, we started advertising the name of our club, the time and date and location of our club meetings in free local media publications and our NS website. We're just getting ready to put up some posters in the local post offices, etc.. I also have a weekly e-mail that goes to all our media publishers requesting publication of our weekly meeting and contact information. We've doubled the number of regular players since the end of the 2014 year. The weekly e-mail contains tidbits of chess news and links to chess sites, including the CFC and NS Association websites along with a particularly interesting chess master game. Realizing that everything takes time, simply publishing the time and place of the chess meeting on a website, doesn't promote enough. For example, we have one player who saw the ad and turned up last Thursday who hasn't played in over 40 years but wants to "get back into the game". I think we'll all agree that regardless of the age, the more people who play chess, the more it assists in promoting the game. I don't know whether we have anyone in our organization who can assist in developing either a "marketing plan" (hopefully at no cost to the CFC and provincial organizations) with simple ideas such as: 1. Sending out weekly e-mails to media publications which publish community events such as chess for free; 2) Develop a date base of print, radio and television contacts on a national, provincial and local level for publicizing chess tournaments or chess related activities; 3) Partner with other organizations to promote chess. Our local organization has arranged a meeting with the city library system to see how we can partner with them to bring chess to the community at large (the meeting is at the end of March, 2016); 4) Chess books; DVD's, training and other materials - Realizing that times are changing with the age of the internet, there are still many who like to hold and read a chess book than to read it on-line. However, it may be possible to partner with your local library (or other facility such as a community college, university or school) to create a chess book/DVD library resource which can be circulated within the library system. Several possibilities exist for the chess association to partner with a library system including: a) Agree to donate chess books to the library system and create a chess book/DVD resource; 2) Obtain a storage space in the library to store their chess sets and training materials; 3) Obtain a room from the library where chess can be played and where training can occur in concert with a chess instructor. I see the end product as an organized list of suggestions of how best to promote chess, where some ideas would be more suitable for local rather than national promotion and vice versa. I'm certain there are many ideas from across the country which can be incorporated into this list. Hopefully, individual chess organizers will benefit from these ideas for their specific activities.

I've also partnered with one of the chess material distributors who provide our members a discount on chess clocks (although I'm in the process of discussing a wider discount agreement to include more items). The more chess books, chess clocks, chess DVD's we get out into the public assists in the promotion of chess. If we're going to get our numbers up, we need to promote. It's difficult to imagine that we have less than 2,000 registered members in a country with the population base of Canada.

In the end, if the CFC were able to develop a plan which could be adapted from the local to the national level, I would suggest that once approved by the Board, that the Marketing Plan can be one of the links on the CFC website for accessibility to all our members who want to create a club or promote their chess events.