Subgoal 1 : DVD

One big important thing is how well the DVD's of Xena sell..

We all know the old ones were distributed by Anchor Bay, but the numbers turned into a mess. We were told by Rob himself. So that's why I don't really care about those DVD's...
I do care for the number of copies sold for the new one, the one being distributed directly by NBC Universal..

So let us use this topic to talk about info on those DVD's..

Some examples : the rankings on Amazon.com, maybe ways to know HOW well they are doing... How to get people buying the DVD, and so on...

To start :

Do you think we could ask Amazon.com if they are allowed to tell us how well the DVD pre ordering went???

And to get more people buying it : I want us to make a deal with the organisation that sells the tickets for the annual LA Xena con. I hope we can obtain 1 golden ticket. Then we tell people that they must email us an image taken from their DVDbox, together with the receipt, and with "Xena10afterFIN" on a little note written, so we know it's for us...

Those people must leave their email and contact data, and then we will, like a lottery take 1 address and that person will have won the ticket!

We should really start pushing about the DVD a little more since it comes out on the 20th. That is only 5 more days. Frederick, how did you get the DVD info you posted on one of the other fourms about the Amazon DVD sales?

Then I really like that golden ticket contest but how do we contact them to get a golden ticket to do this? Also we do not have a lot of time because the DVD comes out soon. If we wait awhile people might also loose their receipt slip showing that they pre ordered so they wouldn't be able to participate in it. We kinda need to make sure that we can do this within the next couple of days or at least know that we can get our hands on a golden ticket as a prize. We can't offer something we don't know we can even get yet.

About contacting Amazon, hopefully this would work https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=508510&type=email&skip=true#csTop they do say they answer most of the e-mails in less than 12 hours but maybe we have an even better chance in finding it out if you call them.

I'm willing to send them a mail, but a phonecall would be more difficult to do because of the time difference and costs If kris would be prepared to call them, ok by me.

Otherwise I'll just send them a mail.

About the tickets... The thing is, I'm not sure if they will "give" us a golden ticket for free... I thought it would be better to ask them when we had our new website (would be better to convince them), but than again, like you said, people can receive their copy from the 20th April on..

Maybe I should just go ahead with it...

Remember that the DVD will probably also appear in local stores, so they can be bought there too....
Maybe we should post on facebook and the current site, to keep the receipt for now... If nothing happens, well, no harm done...

I know golden tickets can be expensive.. It won't be easy to get 1 for free....

Oh of course, sorry for suggesting something like that in the 1st place Frederik, I forgot you're not from USA

I agree we should tell them to keep the receipt for now...

I have sent an email :

"Dear Amazon,

I'm part of a group (xena10afterfin), who's organizing a campaign in order to get a Xena movie to be made. A big important piece of our campaign is to make sure that the new DVD of Xena S1, which will be released on April 20th, sells well.

I was wondering if it's allowed to give us an idea on how well the new DVD is selling (apart from the rankings I can find on the item's page), like how many copies have been preordered already,.

If it's not allowed to do that, then leave this message to be, it's just ment for us as a follow-up.

Kind regards,
Frederik"

Sounds great to me, hope they'll reply.

That sounds good. I was thinking about just the pre ordering as a kinda of deadline but keeping it open after it's in stores sounds better. Saying that we might have a contest to save the receipt for now wouldn't hurt a bit. Also if we don't get a response in a couple of days I'll see if I could call.

I have received a reply, but they are not allowed to give any numbers, so it's a dead end

If you don't ask, you can't know!

Hmm, that's to bad but at least we got a reply so we won't be stuck on something that wouldn't work. All we can really do is ask to see if people will take our poll after they've bought the DVD. Unless anyone has any other ideas?

The rankings on amazon.com are some indication. Seems to do well. My copy has been shipped lol, that's quick! :-)

I've found the website responsable for the Xena con tickets...

http://www.creationent.com

Could it be tickets for the Xena con 2011 are not yet available? Can't find any info on types / prices?

Just got done looking through the site a little bit. I don't see tickets up or even next years con listed. After looking through the list of cons it doesn't look like they even have next years cons up. All the dates are for 2010 and since this years Xena con already ended it's not on the list. Found the main Xena con page too.

http://www.creationent.com/cal/xebur.htm

I did a little digging in the XOC convention page and it sounds like sometimes the tickets are up a week after the last con. On one occasion they were up sometime in April so maybe if we keep watching they will be up soon. Also read that the gold tickets sell out by approximately August/October.

Can't seem to find any contact information though.

Shouldn't we try to get a French Convention ticket for this August?

The annual LA Xena con is still a long time off, and if we want to campaign this summer, perhaps we can boost European sales...

On the other hand... The Xena DVD is region 1 only, with NO subtitles...not really attractive for a native European person.

Perhaps we should try to link that ticket to something else.... and keep our Xena 2011 con for the DVD sales in the US.

Some example : we could ask people to donate $5 on our site. With the money collected, we order DVD's. You can, after receiving those DVD's, send them to the US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan,etc

http://www.amvets.org/taskforcedvd

I've seen this with other fanbases..

Other ideas?

That's a awesome idea. I also really think we should do something for the French Convention but like you said the new re-release wouldn't catch the European eye. We should do something for this event but I'm not exactly sure what.

So with the donations we order DVD's, send them to out to fans, then the fans have the choice to donate the DVD's to amvets.org? I really like the idea of donating the DVD's to a good cause.

Well, it goes like this :

We open an account on paypal, or I use mine (depends on the trust ),
people donate through a module on the site.

When donations ended (we choose how long they can donate),
we use that money to order the Xena S1 DVD's. When received, we send them to amvets, and they'll send it out to the troops.

If something would go wrong and they would refuse it, we could still sell the dvd's on a lower price, and perhaps let people win them... We should keep track of the people who donated, if they would want the DVD still, they would have already paid $5, so this should be kept as a discount.

I like it. Will paypal let you set exactly $5 for a donation or will it be a open donation to let people choose the amount they want to donate?

I've sent a mail to the people responsable for the French Con :

Dear ultimartconvention,

I'm responsable for an organisation, named "Xena10afterFIN". We, a group of fans, are trying to convince NBC Universal Studios to make a Xena movie.

Our biggest goal is to try and convince as many fans as possible, to buy the newly released DVD of Xena : Season 1, because DVD sales numbers are very important when it comes to making a possible Xena project.

To give the DVD sales a boost, we have come up with the idea of letting the fans donate $5 to an account, and with that money, we will buy Xena DVD's, and donate them to the army.

To motivate people, we would like to obtain 1 ticket to the Xena convention in August. So when people donate $5 for our DVD campaign, they have a chance of winning that ticket. So he or she will be able to attend the French convention for free.

I don't know who I should contact to discuss this matter?

Our website is http://www.xena10afterfin.com

Kind regards,
Frederik

So let's see what they say....

I've received my dvd copy today. Looks really nice

Yeah, I got mine a little while back. It looks nice but I haven't had a chance to watch it yet. I was thinking maybe next time for season2 I'll make a unboxing video of the DVD.

I was looking on youtube and for some reason people like to make unboxing vids of their tech stuff and that includes DVD's and other stuff as well. People seemed interested in the new sleeker design and cover art of the DVD so why not show them. Wish I would have thought of this before I opened it and threw the box away.

I have watched it, after i figured out how to make my dvdplayer region free :-) quality looks the same as the other one, but i really love the menus!

About the DVD's : they have dropped a great amount on Amazon, so I really would like to start the "send to the troops" thing.

I was planning to do it by placing a paypal donate button on our site... Asking for a donation of $5 (or more if they want)... After a certain period (1 month), I would close it up and buy DVD's with that money...

Thing is : how many people will actually do that? $5 is not much, so if 100 people would donate $5, we would have $500, which is about 25 DVD's we could buy....

Should we turn this into a contest (but then you'll only reach out to people who are a die-hard Xena fan, and not the others), or do we just announce that campaign, open it up for some period, close it down and see how it went?

I'm rather pro for opening up a donate button, talk about it a lot on fora and facebook, and just buy dvd's when it has reached enough copies...

I don't think attaching it to a con ticket will help globally, as that's only for a real Xenite...

Plus, we must again spend money on another con ticket ourselves, which is not good for our own money

I agree, I also think having a contest for it isn't the best idea for it right now. Also having a new announcement up would be good. We haven't had something big in awhile and it's going to a good cause and getting DVD sales up.

I've created a DVD contest page on the site. For now, it is still hidden. Could you check it out and tell me what you think? When OK, we can launch our DVD for a good cause campaign!.

It's looking good. I was wondering that maybe it would be a good idea to put the name of the organization that we are going to donate to on the page as well. So if people have doubts or questions they can look up the organization and know that it actually exists.