Minutes for the meeting of 20th June:

Attendees           : Vidhi, Vinod, Ganti, Sastry, Muthu
Minutes prepared by : Sastry

1. Publicity Strategy for Asha Hour :
    a) Put out an ad in AIA newsletter.
        - Sastry has contacted Rajan Seth about this.  The newsletter
          goes out in the early part of July and the ad has to be sent
          out to him next week.
    b) Organize a free movie screening at Memorial Union. 
        - The date for the screening has been fixed for July 31st (Friday)
           at 7 pm.  This date was chosen since it is close enough to
           August 14th and yet before the end of the session.  Being a Friday,
           it might attract students more than on other days.
        - Tentatively, the movie chosen is "Maachis".  Vidhi and Muthu
           volunteered to find out where a good copy of the movie can be
           acquired.
        - In one of the Asha Hour updates from Ravi Pappu (Asha-MIT), 
           (http://www.findmail.com/list/asha-core/174.html)
           one suggestion was to screen the 20 min. A.R.Rehman video
           "Vande Mataram" (produced in 1997 ) which could help in
           stirring up emotions among people.  It might be useful to
           watch this beforehand to see how effective it is.
        - Tentatively, the programme for the screening is as follows:
           o Start off with the Vande Mataram video
           o Follow it with a short presentation about Asha and Asha hour.
           o Ganti suggested that the 5-min video about the Little Stars School
              might be screened to give people an idea of what kind of work
              Asha is involved with.
           o The actual movie screening would follow this.
        - Vinod suggested that cards be handed out at the screening informing
           people about Asha Hour and containing the address (where the check
           could be mailed) and other details.
        - Vinod will try to find out about room availability at Mem. Union for
           this date.
        - The movie screening would be publicized via posters around campus,
           emails and ads in Isthmus, Wisconsin State Journal, etc.
    c) Emails on mailing lists.
    d) Posters around campus.
    e) It would be useful if Asha volunteers put up the Asha-Hour posters
        in their offices and help in spreading the word.
    f) Regarding posters, it was decided to download the posters from the
        main Asha page and edit them to have a Madison mailing address.
        A separate poster announcing the movie and asha hour would also have
        to be prepared.
    g) Person-to-person interaction would be another useful way of going about
        publicizing the event.
    h) Muthu contacted Rachel about the audience at the Film Series being
        organized by the South-Asia Center.  The target audience there are
        students who will be going to India and Nepal soon and as such
        might not get involved with Asha now.  So, she felt that it might
        not be all that useful making presentations there.  Instead, it might
        be a better idea to make presentations during the orientation session
        for new grad students.  It might also be possible to hand out
        information about Asha along with the orientation packet.
    i) Find out about events (from TITU?) being organized over the summer.
        We could choose some of these events to set up tables/stalls to hand out
        pamphlets about our events (Asha-Hour, move screening and food fest).

2. Food Fest in September:
    a) Sastry contacted Rajan Seth about licenses.  We are supposed to
        contact him later (mid-August) since this is too early for the
        food fest in Fall.  We could bug him again late July.
    b) As far as publicity for this event goes, the publicity going on for
        Asha Hour could be leveraged for publicizing this event too.  At the
        movie screening, for example, people could be informed of the upcoming
        events.

3. Others:
    a) Sastry suggested an overhauling of Asha-Madison web page, but it was
        decided to keep it a low-priority task.
    b) Presentations have to be prepared that can be used to recruit new
        volunteers during orientation week.  Vinod and Vidhi have slides
        and information from previous years which can be used in making
        these talks.
    c) In regards to recruiting new students, it was suggested that brochures
        could be handed out to new students as part of their orientation
        packet with some help from MFIS.
    d) As far as the brochures go, Sastry suggested that something could be
        done along the lines of what is being done by some East Coast Asha
        chapter.  They compile a set of yellow pages, but largely India-related
        resources (restaurants, grocery stores, etc.) which is of use to the
        Indian community there.  This also helps raise funds through ads.
        Some variant of this could be worked out here.