Tuesday January 4th, 2011

9 members and 7 guest attended the meeting. The main topics discussed were planning for the grand opening party and marketing/advertising.

Grand Opening Party Planning Ideas
* The party will be on Saturday April 9th.
* Need projects for guests to work on.
* Need scheduled demos of machinery(mill, lathe, makerbot, etc.)
* Have completed projects on display at the grand opening(pots of gold and power wheels)
* Need all of the equipment working(lathe, mill, laser cutter, CNC).
* Need more food.
* Need more promotions both traditional and non-traditional(newspaper, radio, TV, facebook, twitter, Google ads).
* prank before the grand opening party possibly on April 1st. Flash mob or critical mass. “Pot Festival” with the pots of gold. Maybe “hack” a billboard in Milwaukee.
* Project our logo on building before the grand opening using a laser, projector, or netting with LEDs.
* Have a large group project that guests can all participate in. Possibly a large junk sculpture made with pieces of junk metal. We could recycle the project after the event. Tom might be able to get sponsorship from Miller Recycling for the event.
* Everyone should come up with an activity or project idea for the grand opening party at post it to the mailing list. We came up with the following ideas at the meeting.
* Junk part project
* beer can drop
* soldering project
* projectile thrower
* egg drop
* oragami
* something with lightning

Website
* We need more photos on the website. (Carl volunteered for this)
* The website looks bad in IE 8.
* Have a button on the site that says click here for a free membership. It would then display
information about the free Tuesday and Thursday nights.
* Have a button on the website that people can click that shows what they get for $80 per month.

Advertising Script Ideas
* Brant and Carl will come up with script outlines.
* My wife will kill me if I buy more tools.
* MM could save your marriage.
* What could you do at MM …
* MM saving the planet one project at a time.
* MM geek zoo.
* MM could solve the energy crisis.
* MM supports natural selection.

Advertising and Marketing Ideas
* Demo videos of running equipment on the website.
* Need more group projects and individual project at the space.
* Need more artists involved.
* Get an email list from MAKE magazine for the Milwaukee area.
* People should send like request to Facebook friends for the Milwaukee Makerspace facebook page.
* Lisa from Evolution marketing (Ben Nelson)
* Determine pricing for advertising(tv, radio, newspaper, magazines, facebook, google ads) (Sean Malloy volunteered for this).

Membership Fee Discussion
* Sean proposed the idea of having some sort of lesser membership level. The idea was voted down by the members at the meeting.
* The membership fee was reduced from $80 per month to $79.99 per month.

Miller Electric Welding Equipment
* Kevin discussed the paper work that he filled out to try and get Miller Electric to donate welding equipment.
* Several members had suggestions.
* Kevin will submit the paper work soon.

Miscellaneous
* We need a door bell and camera at our front door.