Sorry, another very long one.  As many readers will know, I started a college contra group and an in-town group in Orlando just as the pandemic was starting.  There had not been contra in Orlando for a number of years before, but there is a nice dance about an hour's drive from here that gets 50+ dancers every month.  It's got a fairly relaxed tempo that's accessible to many older dancers, but a few younger dancers go.  My goal was to make a Northern-style dance that was attractive to and largely populated by energetic dancers, many of whom might be roughly college-age, as was the case in the dance I learned at in 1987.  Being a professor, I started on campus, literally just months before the start of the pandemic.  The whole story is long and littered with great examples of what went wrong and things to learn from.  Here are some takeaways.

1. Non-dancing just-out-of-high-schoolers think of dancing as a pre-romantic activity.  Two students and I put on an open-to-the-public, very decorated, pop-rock contra dance party on campus.  It was heavily advertised, with a website, posters all over campus, announcements in student activity socials and email lists, Facebook, Discord, Instagram, Reddit, Meetup, Tiktok, local arts calendars, tabling, enticing graphics, you name it. It's amazing what you can line up in over 2 years of not dancing!  It was free to students and baited with tons of free pizza in the heavily trafficked atrium we were dancing in.  We got 35 dancers!  But, just 4-5 students.  MANY students entered the space, looked, turned around, and left.  When our student leaders (2 of the 4-5) chased them down and asked them why they left, they said, "We don't want to dance with our parents!"

Lesson: if you're holding an event intended to get a lot of college-age folks to come who have never danced before, everyone dancing and most of the organizers should be college-age.

Following this experience, we closed the campus dances to those over 30 (that pissed some people off!), and used it as a "gateway drug" to get students to eventually come to our in-town dances, which are open to all.  The experienced students bring new students.  It worked for a while, but see below for how it eventually failed.  Now we have two independent dances.  Or had.

2. Young people today have been bombarded with come-ons to participate in activities from people older than them since their infancy. They are really good at shutting all that out. They barely even remember posters they pass five times a day. Social-media tactics of the past simply don't work anymore. Rather than using socials like Facebook that present things users might like to try, they go for Discord, where defined groups of people interact, or Instagram, where you see just the groups you want to see.  Our group has given out about 1500 business cards with our ad and a QR code, posted many hundred flyers, has a group in every social including some we pay for (like Meetup), has tabled at Pride and other events that draw tens of thousands of visitors, been in local arts podcasts, been featured in local magazines, tabled at large events on campus, etc., etc., etc.  We've done it graphically, with video, with young people as the face of the group. Basically, none of that works directly with any consistency (but, see below).

Surveying our dancers revealed that only two things have ever worked to get people to try contra dancing:

a: Friends dragging friends. Success varies a lot, here. Some people are magnets. Others, well, aren't. (I'm in the latter category.) If you have a magnet in your group who is interested, make recruitment their only job! Years ago, the Monday Night Contra in Concord, MA, succeeded in competing with the more-popular Thursday Night NEFFA dance by identifying the magnets and giving them free admission if they brought all their friends.  Those magnets were established dancers, however.  This was Don Veino's genius and he can share details.

b: Advertising in spaces where people are purposefully looking for an activity. Tabling at the start-of-the-year campus activities midway is the main one of these that has worked for us.  This brought out 45 dancers to the first event, about half of whom stayed through the middle of the year.  Meetup has brought in maybe half a dozen to a dozen dancers in 18 months, so maybe one every other month.  We get a few people a month from web searches, who find our website.  It's really not hard to become discoverable to those looking.

3. A group of old people (I'm 56) can't create a social event for a group of young adults with any real probability of success.  A group of young adults can do it, but it is very hard even for them to succeed at convincing their peers to try it in this age of infinite fun things to do and easy discovery.  You need at least one really talented young leader who is/are themselves inspired to rally others to the cause.  You can give this group advice as they request it, but if you push too hard, they'll find something more fun to do. Lacking such organizers, our campus group, which started with 45 students off the annual student activity tabling event, dwindled away by the middle of the spring semester.

4. People of all ages, but especially young people, are sensitive to the social environment. Forget creepers (no, DON'T, but read on). On at least two separate occasions, we lost 10-20 dancers from our in-town dance in a single evening, who never came back, because a single, well meaning individual tried to give them dance pointers during the dance and was a little too assertive about it. I tried hard to figure out who this person was and failed both times (I was told it was an older woman in both situations, but they were described differently). I was calling; it happened right in front of me and I had no idea.

In the first occurrence, one week the students were there, the next a third of our dancers were gone, never to return. I talked to a few of the dancers who left (they were also in the campus group) and they told me after the fact that the 15 students who had been coming had decided as a group not to attend anymore.  Nothing I could say would interest them in coming back.  They weren't hurt or offended, it just made contra dancing not rise to the level of other fun stuff to do on a Friday night.  One or two did eventually return, but the damage was done. The toxic person wasn't a creepy guy, it was just some lady who made the students self-conscious while, I'm guessing, she was trying to improve the dance.

The second time was four dances ago, and our attendance dropped by 20 dancers. The person who told me why she wasn't coming anymore was a senior medical professional in her mid-30s.  Competing with karaoke, salsa, swing, Lindy, Netflix, pinball, bowling, tiddlywinks, movies, yoga, etc. is tough!

5. But, there seems to be a silver lining in all this "wasted" ad effort. People now know about us, from all the ads.  The ads don't bring them in, their friends do.  But, it's easier if those being dragged by their friends have actually heard of us before.  We get a lot of, "I've been meaning to try this for a while, then Suzie asked me," now.  The socials may not bring in many new people, but they keep the regulars coming back.

6. The social aspect is as important as the dancing itself. People go out to have fun! They ask their friends along if they think their friends will have fun!  So, focus on the fun!  We now take longer breaks between dances (partly because of the high tempo) and we have eliminated "the break", when many leave. Sometimes, people have so much fun socializing that we throw in a random waltz to get them out of the chairs and snacks and back onto the floor. At our most recent event, we had just 18 dancers, one sound tech, a caller, three musicians, and me, but we had 14 dancers in our final dance and 12 went out for ice cream at 10:30 pm.  In the past, half the dancers would be gone by 9:15.  I'm hoping we can build back up to the 40 we had in early September, and soon, as the dance cost $880 and brought in just $260!  I'm grateful to our dance angel and local arts grant agency.

7. Wrapping this together, I think there's a pretty well established set of things to do to make an open dance friendly to younger dancers who want to be there:

Unless it's in an area with particularly strong religious politics, gender-neutral calling and normalizing role experimentation is important (we're gender-neutral and our students strongly like that, but a survey showed that the rest of the dancers don't much like it).

Social environment is important, both stopping creepers and just making it not feel judgy, on the negative side, and making it a party that lasts on the positive (heavy snacks, go out after, decorate, do themes, even organize your volunteers in groups who like to hang out with each other).

Making it free for students helps, and enticing the magnets to bring all their friends helps.  Letting the young people dance with each other, rather than telling them they should dance with everyone, helps a lot.

Empower a cross section of your target audience as organizers and planners, making sure their voice is heard on an equal basis, even if there are much more experienced and vocal people on the board. They want to go to their dance, not yours.

But, none of this means that you'll get a huge number of younger dancers.  You can't make that happen.  Only they can, and they might, for a while. Don't be surprised or discouraged if big groups decide to go elsewhere one day.  This happens.  They're not there to satisfy us, and they have lots of options of things that will satisfy themselves.

--jh--

On Sun, Oct 29, 2023 at 2:12 PM Tepfer, Seth via Organizers <organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

Other ideas:
- most colleges and universities have an “International Student Organization”  office that is looking for Western cultural experiences. Your dance is the perfect fit for them.
- undergrads come and go quickly, but graduate students tend to hang around: post flyers in elevators and bulletin boards of graduate programs
- work hard to encourage experienced (and non creeper) dancers to ask the new dancers - especially during the first 3-4 dances of the night. this is especially powerful if your community leaders (callers, organizers) lead by example with this
- create MeetUp events
- encourage socializing after and outside of the dance. Game nights. Pool parties. Hikes. Invite the entire community. People want to go where their friends are.
- cultivate younger callers and musicians. Much easier said than done and a longer term process, of course.
- must deal with the creeps firmly and permanently. The damage they do is exponential. Not only do those you get dancers not come back, but they tell their friends. Contra has done a poor job in the past of dealing with them. Atlanta had one that, I’m sorry to say, took years of egregious behavior to finally ban him. He went to the swing community and was banned his first night. If creeps are not dealt with, all other work is for nought.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 29, 2023, at 10:55 AM, Sandy Seiler via Organizers <organizers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:
>
> 
> Our community, like many others, has fewer young dancers than we would like.  I am wondering how different factors influence that and what we can do.
>
> Does the night of the week matter?  We dance on a Saturday night.  Would Friday be better?
>
> Does frequency matter?  We dance once a month?
>
> Does location matter?  We have a college (University of Kansas KU)  Would a dance location closer to or on campus matter?
>
> Are outreach strategies effective and what has your community found successful?
>
> Thanks,
> Sandy Seiler
> Lawrence, Kansas
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