DVD Presentations – An Effective Method to Educate and Recruit
by Dave Giordano, Section Leader, New Jersey

Chapters in northern and southern New Jersey have had excellent success using local libraries as a venue to hold DVD presentations. Most libraries have meeting rooms available at no charge to residents in their town. They sometimes even provide the equipment needed for conducting the presentation. Simply call the library and ask to reserve a meeting room.

Personnel at the library may explain that your group must be a non-profit organization. They may ask you about the nature of the presentation or your organization. A good response has been, “We are a non-partisan educational organization, and we hold DVD presentations on constitutional issues and current events.” Normally, the library will not allow you to charge for admission or sell anything, but we have been creative with an invitation for attendees to make a donation. That should be decided by you, depending on your situation.

In addition to one JBS speaker event and seven information booths at community street fairs this year, the South Jersey chapters have held 16 DVD presentations in nine months using Dollars & $ense; The Great Global Warming Swindle; A Case for Repealing NAFTA and Blocking the NAU; Immigration Invasion; Man, Government and Freedom; and 9/11 Press for Truth.

Average attendance has been 25 with half being new, non-Birchers! On several occasions, our presentation ended with a spontaneous round of applause. Other times, the audience indicated a desire to hear more after the presentation ended. These presentations have enabled us to gather e-mail addresses for future events, distribute (and sell) materials, promote our local Meetup, and eventually sign up new members into the Society.

I attribute the success of this program to three things: 1) The current state of the country; 2) a planned calendar of DVD events; and 3) some very dedicated and hard working Birchers who hand deliver flyers inviting area residents to the presentation. You should get started doing this in your area!

Promoting the presentation is always the hardest part. We develop a flyer for each presentation that describes the DVD to be shown plus gives the time and place of the event. One or two weeks prior to the presentation, Meetup members go through the neighborhood near the library to slide flyers into the door handles of the homes in that area. The more flyers delivered, the greater the chances of a strong turnout.

We schedule the presentations for a weekday, just after dinner. Once the date and time is set, we list it on our South Jersey JBS.org Freedom Campaign Meetup calendar. We don’t just simply list the presentation as Dollars & $ense and describe it as “a presentation on the state of the economy, the dollar, and the Federal Reserve.” We add: 1) a graphic related to the presentation, usually the cover of the DVD case; 2) a hyperlink to Mapquest indicating the location of the library; and 3) a description of the presentation including a hyperlink to a recent article in The New American or a YouTube clip related to the subject matter of the presentation.

Every presentation should be accompanied with a selection of corresponding printed material. Be careful to avoid the temptation to overload your audience with all types of material. During our Dollars & $ense presentation, reprints of “Creating Wealth” and “How the Monetary Mayhem Began” made excellent take-home material. The meeting should always end with an action step. Distributing a sample letter to the area congressman or senator sends a powerful message that we are an organization intending to make a difference. At the end of each presentation, we announce that “this presentation is available” for a one dollar donation. So you will want to have extra copies available.

At the conclusion of each event, attendees are invited to leave their name, home address and e-mail address on a sign-in sheet so they can be notified about future presentation and events. We have better success waiting until after the presentation is over to ask for this information because the people who come are initially cautious when they arrive. However, they tend to be very positive after seeing the presentation.

Remember to focus on four things when giving your DVD Presentation: 1) pick a subject that is most relevant; 2) match take-home literature to the presentation; 3) give an action step for your audience to take after the presentation; and 4) invite them to return with a friend for the next event.