by: Ruth Isenberg, MACPA Vice President
The 2016 MACPA Conference is worth planning for in advance. You won’t want to miss this family-friendly weekend at Seven Springs Mountain Resort, April 22 and 23. This beautiful resort in the Laurel Highlands of Pennsylvania will provide a mini-vacation, along with the chance to share ideas with your peers, and to learn from some of the best minds in the free paper industry. Here’s a hint about what we’ll be talking about—our new theme is The Elephant in the Room; the Reality of Digital.
We’ll be telling you more about Seven Springs and the activities planned in future Messengers. If you’d like a sneak peak, the resort’s website is www.7springs.com.
We hope all our members will take part in this Conference, and bring staff members and their families along. Registration remains free for any publisher who runs the MACNET ads each issue. This year, we are charging for hotel rooms at a cost of $119/night, an extremely good rate for a resort of this caliber.
We realize this is a change, and may not be a welcome one, but a reduction in the number of network ads has decreased the amount of money the association can afford to buy down the costs of the rooms for the Conference.
We certainly don’t want to make the room cost a stumbling block to attendance, so we’ve come up with a plan to help solve two problems at one time. Want a free room at the conference? Sell an ad into the network. For each insertion of an ad, you will receive $25 credit toward your room. Take advantage of the 8 week special —buy 5 ads and get 3 free—and you’ve covered the cost of one night’s stay. Or sell an ad into a micro-network and get $25 credit for each week it runs. We also have a 12 week special, too.
Not sure how to go about selling a network ad? We’re going to help there, too. Each month we’ll be scheduling a conference call to train you, or your staff in the art of selling network advertising. We will hold the calls at different times each month so everyone has a chance to participate.
For any of the above sales, you will receive the room credit in addition to the 40% commission for classifieds, or 15% commission for display ads or inserts. Even if you don’t feel able to make the sale yourself, if you provide a lead that turns into a sale to executive director Alyse Mitten and her staff, you will receive the $25 room credit (though not the commission).
If you have any questions about this program, please don’t hesitate to be in touch with Alyse, or with any member of the Conference Committee—John Hemperly, Claudia Christian or me. Suggestions are welcome. We want to make this a conference everyone will enjoy, and will make our association stronger.
