[Tango-L] Community Expansion Brainstorming

[Jacob Eggers]

I have observed that musicians, people who migrated from other dance forms,
and scientific types are all disproportionately represented in the US tango
scene. So, focusing recruiting efforts on people from those areas seems like
the most successful method to retain new tango dancers. Targeting each of
these groups has special added benefits:

Dancers already have many skills that'll transfer to tango, and they also
might start recruiting their friends and students if they become tango
addicts like the rest of us.
Musicians might be inspired to start playing tango music, and if they also
dance tango they might even start playing tango music that's danceable.
Scientific types--well, I actually don't know of any benefit for recruiting
them except maybe that they're generally more affluent and might inject some
extra money into the tango community.

One way to do recruit these people would be to give out free lesson coupons
to people from those three groups. Drop the coupons off at the local salsa
club, give them to street musicians, leave them in music stores, leave them
at universities.... Since it would be extra effort to control the
distribution of those coupons, I would suggest that passing coupons off to
others is allowed. That doesn't seem like much of a risk since musicians are
generally friends with musicians, dancers with dancers, ...

These are just thoughts. I haven't tried any of them, but I would be curious
if anyone has done something similar, or would be willing to do an
experiment. Mainly, I'd just like to start a general discussion on tango
marketing concepts.

chau,
j