LHSA Marketing Update
Gary Hough
LHSA Members,
The last two-and-a-half years have seen a great start to the transformation of your Society. We have evaluated our strengths, stated our Mission and Vision (check our new website for details), developed value propositions that define who we are, and communicated to our members and others in the Leica Community that we can provide a meaningful way to enhance the Leica experience. We have worked extensively with our social media consultant, Socialty Squared in these efforts and they have performed very well. More and more, we are reaching our goal of being perceived in the Leica Community as “The go-to place for all things Leica.”
As part of your leadership team, we hope that we are on the right path for long-term sustainability and that our ongoing partnerships with Leica will lead to even more meaningful engagement with new members of the Leica Community, and, of course, grow our membership. In two years our membership has increased by more than 20%; we still have a way to go to reach a sustainable level, but the direction is right.
I have held the position as your President for the last 2 ½ years, and Alan Weinschel, our able Vice President, will take the baton in Wetzlar in October of this year. He and I, plus other Directors and our Executive Director, have worked extremely hard on your behalf and we have also been grooming a younger generation of Leica enthusiasts and LHSA members to step into our positions in the future. This leads me to introduce you to one of our younger and very energetic new members who has worked with me this summer on social media and will begin serving as an LHSA Director beginning October of this year. His name is Keith R. Sbiral. He hails from Chicago, loves photography and the Leica camera, and has already started to become an integral part of the management of your Society. I asked him to share some thoughts with you.
Keith Sbiral
Keith here. I’m an executive coach and consultant with the firm Apochromatik (apochromatik.com), and lead small-group trips to Cuba (see completecuba.com). I’m also a travel photographer, writer, and of course a Leica enthusiast and history buff (see reddotbluedot.com). In working with Gary this past year I have developed a commitment to cultivate new members, show value to new members, and emphasize the importance of the history both of this great camera and of photography. I believe that cultivating a new generation of photographers is the best way to ensure there are folks who will honor and protect the history that interests so many of us. I look forward to working with all of you.
Now I’ll throw it back to Gary…
Bill Royce
Bill Royce, LHSA Director has been helping with Tips and Techniques, and software ideas and solutions for several years, and he will be continuing in our efforts.
Keith, Bill and I will be working together as part of the LHSA Marketing Team and with our social media consultant Sociality Squared. Our goals are to:
recruit more dues-paying members to allow us to become sustainable;
create more active member engagement;
create more member participation and deeper involvement in your organization;
reach out to more Leica enthusiasts through our social media platforms;
listen and respond to what you and non-members want;
create tighter bonds with Leica and Leica Dealers; and
create liaisons in countries outside the USA to spread our message internationally.
We will develop some strategies to meet those goals and assign tasks to individuals to accomplish them. We have a lot on our plate and would welcome your help and involvement on our journey for LHSA sustainability. Please reach out to either of us if you’d like to get involved.
Thanks for reading and happy shooting,
Bill, Keith and Gary