Flaming Pie

A note to the Switchback Team

Back in February, we wrote about Kevin Kelly’s article on 1000 True Fans.  To recap, Kelly’s theory states that a band needs 1000 True Fans to sustain their career.  As STeamers, you are those True Fans.  We defined a member of the Switchback Team as “a person who has decided to make Switchback a personal part of their lives.”  In other words, you are working with us to help further our musical mission of touching as many souls in a positive way through our concerts, outreach programs to schools and nursing homes, and through our CDs and DVDs.

In the February article, we also stated that we have a problem in the WayGood World.  We’ve identified only 50 STeamers who are active, you being one of them hopefully.  That means to fulfill Kelly’s theory, we need to recruit 950 more STeamers.

To help us grow and sustain the WayGood World, we need to identify and find more STeamers.  It’s just that simple.  And this newsletter is our lifeline to you, our faithful Steamers, as it and the Facebook site are the only active means of communication with all 50 of you.   If we had each of you in one state, that might be a start, but our STeamers are far flung.  For fun, we created a map of the world and here’s where our STeamers reside currently:

As you can see, it’s fairly lopsided.   What to do when considering we need to add 19 people for each one you?  Let’s start with four.  Like the Beatles....if you can help us find a “Fab Four” in each of your neighborhoods, that would be a great start for this year.  You do that by identifying friends who support a cause.  The WayGood World is certainly a cause, as our mission is “to touch as many souls as possible in a positive way through our music.”   Playing our music is a start.  Giving our music as a gift, inviting them to a show, getting them a Switchback t-shirt, inviting them to comment on Facebook online, and meeting with them to strategize a house concert for Switchback are all means of helping us build the support network needed for STeam.  

As always, we welcome your thoughts on the STeam page of Facebook.

A very big thank you to Tom and Maureen Hutchcroft.
They stepped up and filled in at the last minute at the Keokuk Depot show.
They are new STeamers and never worked a show before!