This kid will be a star!

Yesterday's Oyster Festival was a blast.   I have to thank Sharon Foran (also helping me head up our Youth Board) for suggesting we get a booth.  She, Lisa LaRusso and Humera Seyal were our makeup pros and they painted very artistic and sparkly faces from 9-6pm.

Lynn Vetare (on our board) helped with collecting the $5 per face donation till 3pm and then Lori Arsenalt and Joanne Ehresman took over after that.

We also partnered with the Miss CT pageant again and they sent no less than nine queens with sashes and crowns!  Definitely helped draw the eye of the hundreds of passerbys.  We had Shaina Arsenalt playing "Glinda" as well as Ilayda Muftuoglu as "Elphaba".  The kids who got their faces painted could also get a picture with any and all of our beauties.

We did well during the first half of the day, but I had to share with you one of the best marketing ideas I have ever had for the second half of the day.

Jonathan and a couple of his 12 year old buddies came to get their faces painted.  They wanted cats.  Jon convinced another couple boys standing there with him to get their faces done too with some of the best sales pitching I have ever heard.

There were two other face painting booths further down the strip, so I told Jonathan that if he could get other friends to come and get their faces painted I would give him a dollar out of every sale.  This star marketer took his four friends, all with faces painted now, and our "NPT Face painting, $5" sign with him and for a couple hours he actually sold a ton of friends on our booth.  Each one came up to us and said "Jonathan sent us".  Actually he walked them up to the booth and made them say that.  One-to-one marketing in action! Referral marketing!  "Product of the Product" marketing.  And besides that, he is completely fearless.


I video taped him for you so you can see that I am not making him up.  Note his use of the word "ONLY".  I did not coach this kid.  He's gonna be a star all on his own.

Hey Theatres!  Find a Jonathan! Tell your best audience members that you will do special things for them if they walk people up to your ticket booth to buy tickets.  Have a Free Opening Night and let only people who sell 5 tickets to your show attend!  They get backstage tours, and opening night party passes.  Who cares if you forfeit one night of sales if you have 15 more nights sold out!

Back to the Oyster Festival.  As a bonus: We made enough to pay for our new website design that will debut next week some time.  We gathered a ton of emails to add to our list as well.  But I only wanted them to give us their names if they truly wanted to hear from us. Permission marketing.  We got about 50 names.

Thanks to every single person who helped us out yesterday. OH and Andy, thanks for setting up and tearing down the booth!

Video of Jonathan and friends:

MORE adorable faces!