Dear NCA Members:
I know it’s been a crazy, scary, gut-wrenching year so far. Between COVID shutdowns, protests and looting, hurricanes in the Southeast and forest fires in the West, it seems like the body blows keep coming. Now we are on the eve of Halloween – which was supposed to be the best Halloween in years – and I know many NCA members are wondering: “Is my business going to make it to the end of the year?”
I’m writing this note to let you know that the NCA has your back. We’re not just some faceless association that sends you bills and magazines – the NCA is comprised of costume shop owners and vendors who care deeply about each other. It’s harder to see that these days when we can’t meet face to face, but trust me when I tell you that we’re all in this together.
Here are some of the things your association has done this year to help members and the association at large:
- When COVID hit, we held webinars to keep members updated on the situation and offer guidance on securing financial help, selling online, safely re-opening, and other key survival topics. We also sponsored several virtual roundtables that allowed members to see one another and talk about the situation and potential solutions.
- We made sure the NCA biweekly e-newsletter and our website, www.costumers.org, was a source of important information about surviving the crisis. We wrote articles packed with ideas that members shared about how they were overcoming the shutdown and keeping at least some money trickling in. If you haven’t read these yet, be sure to scroll through the home page and check them out.
- We launched the Help Halloween Happen campaign in August. The campaign was funded from donations from eight vendor members and included publishing The NCA Guide to a Safe Community Halloween, which was packed with ideas; the creation of shiny Halloween stickers that members could hand out to kids buying costumes; and a poster-creation service to help members promote Halloween events. We will survey members who participated in this program soon to ask them if it helped, but I’m optimistic.
- Of course we’ve continued publishing Costumer magazine, including the most recent issue that was focused on helping members deal with the crisis and see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Now we’re looking ahead and trying to decide how we can best serve members going forward. We’re going to survey members in the next few weeks to see how Halloween sales went, and to see how everyone is doing in general. Anecdotally, we’ve heard from a few members who are closing their shops – in some cases helped along by COVID, in others just because it’s time to retire – so it’s important for us to know where everyone else stands. So please reply to the survey when you get it.
The survey will also ask members what else we can do in the future to help them and the industry. We’re in the middle of launching several projects that hold promise:
- A new discount program from a company that specializes in discounts for associations. This program, which we’ll officially launch in the next two weeks, has literally thousands of discounts on retail products, travel, dining, etc. Stay tuned for details on this!
- A program that connects costume shops that want to sell posters and banners to local print businesses that specialize in that work. This program, designed exclusively for NCA members, will allow you to earn money from a new and popular product line.
- More educational events, such as webinars and virtual roundtables, that we can safely do online until we can all meet in person again.
There are other ideas brewing, but we’d love to hear ideas from members. So please let us know what you’d like to see.
Bottom line: We’re in a scary time and we can’t yet predict the outcome. But nobody has to go it alone! The NCA is here to help you. We’ve got your back.
- Ed Avis, Executive Director, NCA
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