EchoDitto

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

I managed the email addresses using Campaign Monitor, a cheap ($0.01 per subscriber) email campaign system, and set up a Drupal-based site for blogging and other user management (check it out here). We've now got over 100 fans subscribed, and have used the massive turnout to work with the owners of the bar to become the only place in New York City to serve Vienna Beef Chicago-style Hot Dogs and Polish Sausage, and Goose Island Beer - all imported from Chicago. The next step: Old Style, the classic Chicago sports beer. All in all, it's been a successful few weeks, and a lot of fun, and just goes to show that at EchoDitto we're great at what we do because we use this stuff in our daily lives.