Singapore Reef Club at Aquarama 03

[Achilles Tang]

Hi everyone,

First off, I must say that this event would not have been possible without the help of many people especially Morgan and Phang. Special mention to Morgan because he was there from beginning to end of EVERYDAY including the day when I wasn't there to rush the poster designs for the last minute sponsors' sales of products for fund raising and getting the forum up JUST before the 1st public day of Aquarama. Also for the transportation help...

You have my personal gratitude, Morgan.

A big thanks also to our booth sponsors who came in with cash sponsorship and made possible the covering of costs towards the rental of the 2 computers and LCD screens and the laser colour printing, lamination and mounting of the many posters, stationary, transportation costs etc.

The sponsors were eAquaNature (thanks Edmund), Titanium/Reef Relief Chillers (thanks Dr Chill), Reefez (thanks Ming), Reef Associates (thanks Pang), X-glare.com (thanks gary) and I-box (thanks Ian).

The event was quieter on the Trade Days, althought it was good to meet up with industry people especially the LFS who came to look us up... eg. Henry from Marine Life, Thomas from Ocean Planet, Edwin from Paradise Reef, Steven from New Trio and Jon from Coral Farm. It was a surprise also to see many SRC reefers who came in as Trade Visitors!

The weekends were much busier of course, and the sale & display of items from our sponsors brought the crowds in to check them out. The many SRC well-wishers who came in also made our day as we made many new friends and finally put faces to nicknames!

To the many helpers who came and helped us out, Rumour, Bum, Flubberina, Victor... A BIG THANK YOU TOO!

Overall, I deemed our participation in Aquarama a success because we promoted our club to quite a few marine hobbyists who have not found us yet and also helped promote our message of Responsible Reefing to the public...my seminar speech hopefully did bring across this message.

We have also met quite a few people who proposed tying up some events together with the club. When the time is right, I'll announce them!

I hoped this wouldn't be the first and last time we come together as a club and make things happen... especially with the one week downtime that came just before the exhibition and hampered our communication, and caused the T-shirt Fundraising Project to be shelved! Yet despite that, we DID IT!

You SRC dudes and dudettes rock!

At your service,

Achilles Tang

[optimist]

Hi AT

New to reef keeping but here are some suggestions on improving your presence at the next show.

As this is a virtual club, this website address should appear on the overhead signboard rather than the club’s name. Very important to ‘sell’ the right brand.

The tables and items blocking the front entrance should be moved back against the wall so that more people can come into the booth to look at the write-ups/posters on the wall. The font size of the posters is too small to be read from outside the booth as I could not get in due to the crowd and limited space.

Rather than spending money on glossy posters, may I suggest printing brochures/leaflets that highlight useful threads of the forum that might be of interest to beginners, including some of the members’ interesting questions and replies. Again, the idea is to ‘sell’ the website. These leaflets can be given out together with the show tickets. You can sell advertising space on the leaflets to recover cost of printing.

I could not differentiate the booth officials from the public. Too bad you could not have the club’s T-shirt printed on time.

Upgrading to a 6 ft tank after experimenting on a 3ft one for a year. Got useful information from many websites, including this. Keep up the good work. A big thank you to you and the gang.

[Achilles Tang]

Fully agree with you. Thanks for sharing!

There were some things that could have been improved.

1. The URL should have been very prominent. Like our neighbour Arowanaclub.com, they had a very long banner across their backwall.

2. We should try getting a bigger booth too. I think we had more traffic at our booth than they did. IMO.

3. Being space restricted, there was very little space to move inside. Also, our neighbour across the aisle blocked the lane with their fish sale. Thus a lot of people were jammed up outside.

4. We did give out brochures. Those were so quickly snapped up that we had to go out and photocopy them... thanks Ian, Flubberina and Bum for your help.

5. Perhaps we could have also gotten better display shelvings or get even bigger LCD screens to be displayed more prominently next exhibition!

Anyone else wish to give us feedback to better improve?