Not sure this has been mentioned anywhere, but the above event is this coming Wednesday evening.
Those of us who are lucky enough to be in work, could we all mention the event to our bosses and see what the reaction is? Not sure what the club have done to market it, but if anyone can help please make contact with the club.
I went, I must admit I'm not really a very 'corporate person', but as a player sponsor I was interested in finding out what plans they had.
Personally I thought the attendance was a bit dissappointing, but Gary Calder alluded to the fact that they had/were sending out a lot of brochures and had been contacted by a number of companies that had expressed an interest but couldn't make the evening.
By way of introduction Gary reiterated a lot of things that had already been said at the Fans forum about getting the club more involved in the local community and doing a lot more work to get commercial support as well as from local schools (some early results of which should be apparent at Saturdays home game). He also announced that the players would be more involved on a rota basis in off-field activities, whether it be school visits, companies etc. Also Mark Darnell who was there offered to help the club put together a list of companies who had been quite involved in the club in the past to encourage their re-involvment, as there seems to be a distinct lack of any of those records that they have been able to find.
As for the brochure itself, it's well presented and professional looking (again something that seemed to be lacking, certainly from when I approached the club regarding player sponsorship last season) and has a number of new opportunities as well as the usual ones.
One thing I noticed was the re-introduction of a VP package, now called the VP Executive Club, expanded from the old package, to include an advertising board and programme ad. I'm sure the price which was POA is also suitably expanded, but there's plenty of other options for various budgets.
For anyone interested if you get in touch with the club I'm sure they'd be only to happy to send out a brochure with details of packages and pricing.
Had a quick chat with Gary and the Ken Wilde mentioned in the article concerning the evening on the official site, who has been brought in to help out with the Commercial aspects of the club and both seem keen to bring back some vibrancy to the club which has been much missing in recent years. As to whether they succeed or not, only time will tell. As Gary pointed out what happens on the pitch has some bearing on this too.