Heritage

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Ian Evans, Bob Trelford and Master Stone Mason Bill Robinson head again for the Island.  It's fall, but a nice day.

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Now we were moving.  We had some approvals, the makings of a boat, a good business plan and lots of energy.

We engaged master stone mason Bill Robinson to help us and we had a reconstruction plan.  We needed marketing and money.

Donations

John Trelford bought us some marketing tapes and we looked at them closely.  They gave two key messages:

1.  Fund raising and marketing are not events, but part of an orchestrated process that includes:

• The public has to see the image of the project over and over again.  Establish a brand.

• You will get most of the money very close to home, but your product customers may come from far and wide.

• Some fund raising techniques like raffles raise a small amount of money.  They are really a part of the repetition process.  You  have to do them along with the big events.  It's important not to bother potentially large donors with your smaller fund raising efforts.  We had to get into the public's face and never leave it.

• Identify your top donors early.

2.  No contact is too small and the message given by every person on the project has to be the same.  A mixed or blurred message never sells.

Before we started raising money, we got a donor recognition strategy together.  Jim McLay suggested it as a model based upon a large project in Amherstburg, Ontario.  This worked wonderfully as people donated not one time, but many times to achieve donor levels, which were:

• Queen Victoria's Crew $25,000

• Captain Lambert's Crew $10,000

• Lighthouse Keeper $5,000

• Assistant Lighthouse Keeper $1,000

• Lifesaving Crew $200

• Shipmate $20

These donations were deposited in the Town account that was allocated for us.  Bob Trelford maintained the list on a set of 3x5 cards and tax receipts were issued. 

It was wonderful to see the cards grow in number.  What was interesting too was that people were donating again and again to achieve one of the benchmarks shown above.  It is a terrible  mistake not to recognize people in this way. 

It often happens that people get embarrassed about the list and who is on it and at what level.  So what?  That's the point after all.

Our very first donor Agnes Cserhati hugging the Inuksuit symbol of our project

To hear the song 'We Were Here' by Michael Goodwin Click Here

Our very first donor lived in Toronto and she was a young woman, who had enjoyed her vacations here.  She loved the Island.  Her name was Agnes Cserhati.  Much later we took her to the Island for a visit.  She loved it even more

Doug Huber's Fishing Tug 'Little Snick'  Snick would play a key role in the restoration.

Doug Huber at the wheel of his baby 'Little Snick'

The most important early donor was Doug Huber.  He gave $1500 toward the project.  That gift was vital.  Doug had a solid reputation in Town.  He was well respected.  His father was a Lighthouse Keeper and he had lived on the Island at age 8.  He had been in the Coast Guard and a commercial fisherman.

Everyone respected Doug and when he donated, it was like having the Bishop's Imprimatur.  If he thought it would be a success, then it would be.

Not only did he donate, but he used his fishing tug Little Snick to help us transport people and material too large for our borrowed, rag tag and tiny fleet of barges and boats.

Bob Huber (L), Lightkeeper Alfred C. Huber and son Doug Huber in 1943.  Doug slept in the loft of the house and helped us tremendously in the Restoration of Chantry Island

External Marketing

Most volunteer groups think that getting a few pictures in a local newspaper that is used to wrap the garbage the next week is marketing.  We knew better.  Marketing is establishing a brand and then flogging the living heck out of it.  You have to have in depth awareness drummed into the public psyche.   We were doing this before the maturity of the  Internet.  Now the Internet would be our focus because of depth and reach.

I needed some tools to start the process, because that was my job on the board.  I put together a slide presentation that followed both the business plan and the progress we were making.  As more progress was made, I added slides.  The business plan remained the same.  The vision never varied.

Joe Sholtes (L), Bruce Chapman and Bob Trelford at the top of the Lighthouse

I also needed something tangible to show what we were doing.  I decided on a portable diorama and asked Bruce Chapman of the three Chapman brothers to build one for me. (more later about Bob, Bruce and Jack Chapman).  The specifications were:

• It had to be in a sturdy case that I could transport to talks that I planned to give to raise money and awareness.

• It had to show the Lighthouse and environs in situ so that people at a glance could see the geography of the Island and buildings.

• It had to be impressive and portable.

Bruce  Chapman produced this handy box with 3D visuals of the total island and the Lighthouse itself.

Bruce presented me with a rectangular case with a sturdy handle and piano hinges.  When opened both top and bottom presented the Island in full with all the buildings.  The tall Imperial Light was laying flat and it when stood up on a dowel it made everything 3D and in scale.  It even had foliage.  I used this case in 89 presentations from Tobermory down the Lake Huron coast, all over Ontario and as far away as Nova Scotia.

Mike Goodwin sings to a group at the Boat House in July 2000 as we do our regular external marketing routine.  We always packed to Boat House with people sitting up on the stairs to the loft too.

Mike Goodwin sang at many of these early presentations, John Rigby worked the crowd and passed out literature and I gave the talk.  John estimates that he did this with me over 20 times.  We took a screen, slide projector, literature, guitar and smiles on the road.  On some Bob Treford would come.

Mike Sterling speaking at the Boat House.  Mike is holding a prop, which is a piece of hemlock cut and milled in Trelford's bush.  These props helped us define the project to people along with the slides and diorama.

No group was too small or too far away.  We did Churches all over Bruce County eating well prepared dinners or lunches.  Teas and cookies were attended and consumed.  Some audiences were small, but many were large.  We were looking for customers and donors.  Women's institutes, Canadian Legions, Rotary Clubs, schools and all manner of service clubs were visited by us.  Jim McLay and I did talks together to students and parents.  Jim was a natural, especially with children.

The Boat House is jammed literally to the rafters to hear one of our Restoration talks with music.

It was quite a task.  We had to adapt to every situation.  We never assumed that extension cords would be at hand.  Mike Goodwin even built a table of the right size so that the projection would be at the right height.  It folded up so we could transport it.  I got so used to doing these that I never had to prepare.  I had the entire thing memorized.  We ended up with about a 100 slides from start to finish.

The 90th presentation was given to the Canadian Senate by Vicki Tomori and I in the spring of 2011.  We cut it down to a short summary.

I gave the talk 3 times to another Lighthouse group that had 125 potential volunteers.  They seemed to enjoy the talk, but did not understand the message I was giving them about getting started.  The specialized in meetings and bylaws, but never thought of just starting to do something.  They spent their time applying for grants..

Other Marketing Tools

Chantry Island Sunflower Seeds.  This was one of many  minor awareness marketing ideas that we had and implemented.  Note the 'giant' sunflower.

We used the following extensively:

1. Theme directed Concerts with local artists participating.  Later we even got 4 time Juno award winner Valdy to perform for us.

2. Fish Fries.... these were very profitable and attracted large crowds of up to 700 people served.  We had this down pat and we could return over $5,000 pure profit each time.  This was another way to market us and was worth way more than the $5000 income from a gross of $10,000 every year.  We used about 40 volunteers on a single holiday in the summer.

3. Television was used extensively.  We worked with Chris Hughes of Bruce County Tourism.  He had at least 6 TV specials for National Public Television in the USA, the home and Garden Channel, History Channel and more.

4. One of our most significant shows on TV was done by the Matlocks (Diane Verneil and John Matlock), who did a documentary that aired on CTV in 2001. It was repeated 6 times.  It was done by professionals and showed the beauty of the project and the dedication of the volunteers.  It was entitled "We Were Here".

5. We allowed artists to work on the Island as we worked.  For example, Linda Bester did 30 paintings entitled "A Day at Chantry Island".  She sold some of them internationally.

6. International Lighthouse groups were reached via email  We sent out over 15,000 emails to Lighthouse tourists and enthusiasts world-wide.  This morphed later into holding the 2006 International Lighthouse Conference here in the Bruce County Museum and Cultural Centre.

7. Bob Trelford built a boat and we raised awareness by raffling it off.  Keep in mind it was not the money from such small numbers involved, it was repetition of the brand.

8. We even did a Chantry Island Seed package that contained sunflowers.

9. We started Chantry  Island Institute that was a series of lectures by local and national experts on the setting and history of Marine Heritage in Bruce County.  Ken Rothenberg and Margo King headed this up and they flogged a steady lecture audience to come for workshops and lectures.  This was well received and they averaged over 50 people at each lecture and sold many season tickets.  They marketed by pamphlets on car windows, posters in windows and simple awareness tools.

10. Golf Tournaments were very profitable and raised awareness. They raised between $3000 to $5000 per annum.

11. To raise money, a local group of men and women held a scramble every week on Friday afternoons.  I was invited to play  and they gave us  $600 to as much as $800 each week for the restoration.

12. Local newspapers were used modestly, but remote and much larger publications featured us many times in their travel and tourism sections.

13. Radio was used with interviews. For example, we did a radio show live from the Chi-Cheemaun ferry in Tobermory.

14. We produced a CD of Chantry Island songs.

15. The Art School established an artist in residence at our suggestion, who participated in teaching and Chantry Island Institute lectures.

16. Artist Eric Luce created many Chantry Island images as did other artists.  Classes were held each summer on the Island.

One of Linda Bester's painting in the series in which she depicted a day at Chantry Island with volunteers.  This painting was done just prior to the opening on August 11, 2001

We even had Chantry Island Wine with the above label

The annual Fish Fry was a great success.  We got better and better at this and cleared over $5000 each year on gross sales of about $10,000

The whole idea of marketing was saturation with not only the talks, but with the logo.  The logo morphed itself into hundreds of address signs all over Saugeen Shores and especially in Southampton.

The Imperial Light image appears all  over the town... the Bruce County Museum Sign, Library, G.C. Huston School, the library and more.....

Every event and activity we had used the Imperial Tower as its symbol.  If you have a great logo, then use it.

Also, get a day or weekend per year and build around it each and every year.  This allows your marketing message to be constantly in front of the public.

It's nice to put a single article in a single publication, but it does not do much other than add to the saturation.  So one thing is never enough.  It's machine gun repetition that counts.

Next Article will cover the transport of material to the Island

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Monday, August 08, 2011