Today's the last day of my vacation. We didn't go anywhere -- mostly we just stayed home to read and play video games. It was great to spend the time with the little boys.
Just before I came home for vacation, I got involved in a silly argument with a guy in the ELNA mailing list. One of the ELNA board members floated the idea that ELNA was considering changing their name. I pointed out that I thought changing the name was a waste of time. Several people accused me of discouraging people from volunteering or trying to tell people how to spend their time. My argument was that, if you look at the serious problems confronting ELNA, changin the name should be pretty low on the list of priorities -- if you're on a sinking ship, it doesn't really matter what's painted on the name plate and painting it over with something else isn't going to stop the ship from sinking. At the same time, I realized that it isn't at all clear what people could do to help ELNA -- ELNA hasn't really offered any guidance or provided much in the way of opportunities for people to get involved.
For a couple of years, I've had an idea for a guerilla marketing campaign to try to publicize Esperanto. I decided to try to draft it as a proposal for something productive I thought ELNA might be able to do to turn the organization around. The goal would be to get people to volunteer in a series of coordinated initiatives to get the word out about Esperanto. By strategically using complementary approaches, we could target particular audiences and amplify our effect. The first idea I had was to use a stencil to chalk up green stars everywhere for a couple of weeks. Once we've piqued people's curiosity, we switch using a stencil that has stars with an "E" in them and aim for an advertising blitz: get ads on TV, put up a bunch of flyers that use the same logo and provide the URL for a website to visit. But there are a bunch more approaches that could be tied together that would magnify the effect even more.
It primarily depends on whether or not we can get the Esperanto community fired up. I think there's an opportunity right now. With the end of the political campaign season and with the economy running on half its cylinders, I think people have a little time right now. Maybe we can get enough people excited to pull it off. It would transform the Esperanto movement in the US if we could increase the size ten-fold. And there's no reason why we couldn't -- I think it just requires a bit of vision and a lot of effort.
StevenBrewer