INTERNATIONAL COSTUMERS GUILD INC

Our organization promotes the art and science of costuming by encouraging those with interests in various genres of costuming to create and join local chapters, where members can exchange knowledge and experience. We aim to serve both professional and hobbyist costumers world-wide, and provide a spectrum of educational programs that includes training for professional, semi-professional, hobbyist costumers, and educational outreach to secondary, and post-secondary schools to supplement existing curriculum. We also aim to become a useful resource on costuming related topics to the broader community, as well as to the media and news organizations.

Our strategies for making this happen include: 1) focusing on increasing awareness of the International Costumers' Guild and its mission world-wide; 2) providing focused support to costumers in geographic locations world-wide who want to form local or regional chapters; 3) developing new educational material and publications on costuming related topics that focus on costuming research, construction, and exhibition; 4) making it attractive for secondary and post-secondary educational organizations to form chapters supported by faculty and to supplement existing costuming-related curriculum; 5) actively participating in public activities and conferences where costuming plays a significant role, and 6) expanding our outreach world-wide to increase our diversity and encourage regional costumers to participate and to help celebrate and preserve their cultural identities.

We are a volunteer organization whose members have interests in a wide range of types and genres of costuming. This diversity of interests puts us in a good position to attract and serve new and existing costuming groups regardless of their focus. Our members are extremely visible and active in many costuming related events, and we have begun a campaign to increase awareness of our organization at these events. We have made progress in providing focused support for costumers who want to form new local or regional chapters, and for existing costuming groups who would like to affiliate with us. We are also adding benefits for both chapters and their members as an incentive to affiliate with the International Costumers' Guild. We plan to add others benefits as funds from memberships and other sources increase.

While we have made some progress in establishing a pipeline of new chapters (4 have joined in the last 12 months), the pipeline requires significant followup by volunteer members, and we still developing methods to persuade existing costuming groups to affiliate as chapters. We are just starting planning for a program to develop chapters at secondary and post-secondary educational institutions, and this is likely to take a year since it is being done by volunteers. We are in the early stages of a campaign to gain more name recognition, first at major international and regional conventions. Our PR budget is limited for expenses like printed collateral and program book ads, but we are planning to recruit member volunteers who attend conventions as ambassadors, and providing them with new collateral material we have developed. We have yet to begin a focused initiative to develop more international chapters, although PR efforts at international conventions are a first step.