Participation
The bulk of this project will rely on the involvement and participation of the public of West Chester. Most of these contributions will be gathered through the use of word-of-mouth marketing and flyers. Our angle is that people who care about the topic of drag as it appears in West Chester, Pennsylvania will have a unique and unparalleled interest in sharing their stories and knowledge on the subject in order to enhance and spread awareness of drag culture–a topic which previously has had little to no documented history of archives in West Chester.
Word-of-Mouth Marketing
The majority of our project contributions will be gained through this method. We plan to inquire to people individually, which will then spread and disperse throughout the community thus creating a hub of knowledge-all of which will be accessible through the portal set up for our project. Word-of-mouth marketing will be a useful tool for a project such as ours because, though there may be a lesser number of individuals participating in a project of this nature, we expect that there will be a high level of engagement. This is because the people who are passionate about this topic will have a desire to contribute to the archive of its history and, because of their passion, will also have a desire to talk about this project and to spread the word in order to gain more contributors in order to make the archive bigger and better equipped to answer any questions future generations may have on this subject.
Flyers
Flyers will also play a large role in our gathering of information. Flyers are a useful way in which to get information out to a large amount of people with a small amount of effort. By placing flyers all around West Chester, we therefore are promoting our project to any and everyone who happens to pas by our flyers and see it. This thus opens up the hub of information in our project resides to those who have not come in contact with it by word-of-mouth marketing.
Acquiring Information
We plan to acquire information on this topic by crowdsourcing the history of drag culture, queens, and performances occurring in West Chester, Pennsylvania. This will be facilitated by having a portal in which people are able to upload their stories, artifacts, memorabilia, and ephemera, which in turn will then be able to be viewed and shared by any and everyone who comes across the project.
