Maybe….this is the most common responses when it comes to people committing to anything, from events to date nights, this answer plagues calendars everywhere. I’ve decided to blog about this, because i am guitly of taking it even further, i am slowly becoming a flake full of false promises, sometimes I flake on purpose, other times on accident. Rest assured I will be taking a lot of my own advice. On a side note, seeing as most of my blogs are nightlife centric, i’ll try to keep the rest of this relative to nightlife, but, feel free to extrapolate my points as you see fit.
One of the first things you learn as a promoter is that “maybe” normally means “no”. I’m not sure why it’s so hard to say no, especially to a promoter, but, apparently it is. I feel like the “maybe or false yes” is the easy way out for the time being, giving no thought to the bigger picture. Imagine spending 20hrs asking people to come to your event, imagine having a pretty good response, 150 yes, 150 maybes and 30 no’s. Imagine being really excited for one of your first events, only to have 50ppl show up. Imagine losing hundreds, even thousands of dollars because you planned for a much larger group. This kind of situation is what causes the floods of event invites and mass messages. Promoters quickly find out how unreliable/cowardly people can be so they begin increasing their invite capacity based on their initial return (ex. if i only got 50 out of 300 then i need to invite 3000). Older, more seasoned promoters just work harder on the relationships they have with their current friends/customer base.
If I have any advice to offer, i advise everyone to be up front (i need to take this advice myself). If you’re tired of telling someone no over and over again, then let them know you’ll be in touch when you’re at a point in your life that going out makes sense. You have to realize that you don’t owe us anything, just because we’ve let you in free doesn’t mean that you have to come to each and every one of our events, even though we do recognize and appreciate it. I have people that i see 4x a year, and I treat them like kings, often better than people i see 2x a month. I do so becuase these particular people respect me and put effort into our relationship.
You start being more up front with your responses and i promise you the spam and aggressive promoting will retreat. If I send out an event invite and get a %5 response, i’m more likely to stop sending them. If I get a %40 response, even if most of it is false, that’s large enough for me to keep taking the chance. The bottom line is this….if i’m not human enough to recognize that most of my friends don’t like going out 5x a week, then there is something wrong with me. Personally, i’m just as happy when someone tells me they are staying in with their significant other as i am when they say they are coming out (even though it makes me a little less money). The word no pushes me to create events that make friends/clientelle more comfortable, it pushes me to create events that are more desirable to attend, and, it pushes me to create new relationships that value the commodity i have. Going out doesn’t make everyone happy, but, for some, it’s the release they need when it comes to handling a stressful daily life, we as promoters need to help those people, not annoy the ones that are at a different stage in their life. So, unsubscribe from my email list, my text list, block my event invites, it won’t hurt my feelings, it will actually help me.
This blog will probably make very little difference in how people respond to promoters, there will probably be the exact same amount of “maybes” as there always have been. If you do take anything from this, please cut down on the “false yess”. Think of it this way, most of us have no problem telling someone yes and then coming up with an excuse or just plain no showing, yet, they expect their friends to be there when they have something important going on. How would you react if we actually returned the favor by throwing fake events. How would you feel if you were ready to show some friends a good night only to show up at an empty venue. At this point, I may know that “maybe” normally means no, but, every time it happens, it still takes a little piece of me, it still lets me know that people really don’t respect what it is I do, don’t take me seriously, or just don’t think about consequences. Something that may seem so miniscule to you may not be to someone else. Just because I have 200ppl bail on me every week, doesn’t mean I don’t notice when you do it. In closing, have a great weekend, no matter what you do.