At SOLINET, we are trying new and funky ways to make sure not only our fellow staff members know what we do, (hitting my co-workers on the head with a club hasn’t helped so far) – but also people we meet out in the field. We created trading cards to give out – including some fun facts about ourselves but also some relevant information that would be useful to explain what we do and who we are, to people. What we found was that some fellow staff members weren’t always sure who taught what – and who was responsible for what subject matters. Hopefully this will be a fun way to get that information across.
If all goes well – meaning the cards have a warm reception by our staff members, we may give some out to attendees at our upcoming SAMM – (SOLINET Annual Membership Meeting). The cost was quite good, and we even had them printed on post-consumer waste paper to fall in with our green initiatives this year. Just to give you an idea of the cost of the trading cards – we made 40 cards of 6 people each and it cost $70. The size of the cards when printed will be 3.5″ X 2.5″. We are doing a Training Showcase here next Monday (24 March) to promote our newest classes to staff members and each will get one of our cards.
Here is an example of the front of my card:
And the back of my card:
What sorts of interesting promotional things do you do?
Max… What a great idea!! We are always looking for new ways to get our information out to our employees on what training has to offer. I think this would be a great presentation for the CLENE Showcase in Anaheim – Are you interested in participating? All you need to do is sign up on our CLENE website. The showcase will take place on Sunday afternoon at Annual in Anaheim. Cheers, Stacy
Great idea, Max! I’ve been noodling around with the idea of ways to personalize leave-behind info for library staff to use when they visit schools in their regions. I think this may be the way to go! Trading cards + school visits = perfect, fun way to promote the library and the librarian!
Tony
Thanks y’all! (My fake southern accent) I am not attending ALA this year – but maybe next year. Our graphic designer here used existing trading cards and then used photoshop to insert “us” into them. I personally wanted either the Goonies or Little Shop of Horrors.
Where can you buy the custom trading cards?
We went through a local printing company – first we had our graphic designer (Sam Mitchell at SOLINET) find some examples of trading cards on the web. Then he used Photoshop to insert digital photos we took into the trading cards. So it was an in-house project, but if someone you know has a little bit of Photoshop ability – they can probably do it too.
What a great idea! You should start a new Flickr group just for these.
What a terrific concept and idea!!! Hope all is well!!