National Night Out - Ideas Wanted

[NIN]

OK, guys and gals, all y'all know I'm pretty not-too-bad at this recruiting thing.

For the fall, I've volunteered to take charge of the unit open house and recruiting night. To that end, I'm lining up my various "recruiting opportunities" in advance of the actual Open House and one that sticks out is something we've recently been invited to, but never really did anything with before, the local "National Night Out" (http://www.natw.org/).

Now I'm sure the National Guard will be there with their climbing wall and other neato things (vehicles, etc), the local PD with their DARE cars, etc.

The current thinking for our participation is to setup a table and hand out flyers for the Open House 4 weeks later. 

While I'm sure this method would work as the "last resort," I'm thinking its just not "dynamic enough."  I'm brainstorming hard to come up with something that would be engaging to our potential audience, memorable and not just a bunch of cadets standing around in uniform handing out flyers.

I don't think we can afford any inexpensive trinket type take aways (ie. carabiners) in the numbers that we'd expect for the turnout.  I would guess that we'd hand out 500-750 of those, and thats just too darn spendy for a small recruiting effort.

I was trying to come up with some kind of a neato activity-based thing that would attract attention and not be terribly expensive to implement. Obviously, renting out something like a climbing wall would be out of the question, along with "Peg the Colonel with a Paintball gun".  But has anybody done something similar where they attracted attention with some kind of activity?

ETA: And has anybody else had any experience at a National Night Out event in their area?

[NC Hokie]

Here are some inexpensive suggestions:

- call wing and see if they can loan you a set of fatal vision goggles; if not, there's an activity in the DDRx book where you can build a passable set from regular lab goggles

- call NHQ and see if they can send you a batch of recruiting flyers and paper airplanes

- leave an active training beacon in your vehicle and let visitors experiment with a set of DF sticks

[NIN]

Good!

I also considered roping off an area and doing a very mini version of the "triangle compass course" (maybe 20 paces between points) and give people a prize based on proximity to the start point.

[Eclipse]

A lot of departments will already be doing something with their own goggles, and might see it as competition, however if not, you could
play basketball wearing them, or bean bags or something.

Cadet Ken is cool, though he's likely spoken for.

Providing assistance to the sponsoring town in uniform is a good, high-visibility way to get involved, too.

[LTC Don]

Good!

I also considered roping off an area and doing a very mini version of the "triangle compass course" (maybe 20 paces between points) and give people a prize based on proximity to the start point.

:LIKE:

[Walkman]

What about setting up a practice beacon and L'Per and have guests take turns playing with DF'ing and make running an azimuth?

[NIN]

Cadet Ken is cool, though he's likely spoken for.

Cadet Ken is riding the pine due to budgetary issues.