I, too have been thinking about what might be able to be improved.
The weekday-weekend thing is the toughest. As previously mentioned, I rely on my wife and her extraordinary people skills and intuition- it's almost unearthly.
She went with on the 11th and pronounced that in her view, the weekday issue was tops. I'm not sure I agree, but that's what she said, and she's almost always right when it comes to reading a large group's pulse.
I'm just sort of glad it's not my call.
One thing that I also return to often is that this was the first. Should it be possible to put together another or more, the word will naturally spread and the delivery will be more complete.
Consider this: I shoot at a club in southeast Wisconsin and a regular attendee is a full-time gun-rights lobbyist in that state. He was right in the middle of the nearly-won right-to-carry attempt there in the last few years. He's tuned in and knows stuff. But Tuesday evening when we squadded together and I mentioned the rally, he said it was the first he'd heard of it.
That suggests the wider-area groups like the NRA, SAF, GOA, and so forth might be recruited earlier and more heavily to assist the word-spreading.
The lead time was another thing that my wife mentioned, and I think there's agreement all around that something intended to be large needs at least a couple months of promotion. Nothing surprising there. The '08 IGOLD was a good success with months of planning. CGOLD (as a guess for a name) would turn out a larger throng with three months of advance work.
But that points to the hard part. It's work. I tend to see the ISRA as the main sponsor and the most effective instigator/coordinator. Not to slight any other group, but that's how it looks from this vantage point.
The ISRA has done a phenomenal job here and with IGOLD. It has risen to the occasion extremely well.
But it's volunteers, for the large part, and they have their limits. Expanding the volunteer base will help; success will help expand the volunteer base. Here, the chicken and egg seem to be arriving on the same train.
That leads to my last observation, that the location was good. Public transportation, we understand, is either alien or anathema to most folks who aren't from around here. Metra, the commuter rail system, is outstanding, one of the best on the continent. Where it can be used, it's way the best: cheap, fast, reliable, and close. We walked from Ogilvie (the old Northwestern station) in an easy twenty minutes. Union Station (Amtrak/Metra) is only ten minutes further. If this could be laid out more explicitly, it would probably encourage a good number of fence-sitters to come on down.
CTA is good, too, but doesn't reach as far out and so doesn't help our outlander friends as much. Amtrak has value, especially in the Bloomington/Springfield/East St. Louis corridor, not to mention the north-to-Milwaukee Hiawatha line.
Just laying out transportation options will be an easy way to make attendance more viable for people who (with a bit of justification) view central Chicago as a don't-go-there kind of place.
I'll venture to say our non-Chicago friends who did make the effort and came down via Amtrak or other public transportation means will testify that it wasn't hard, it wasn't scary, and it really turned out to be effortless.
Here's hoping enough of us can put together enough of this excellent effort to make it happen again. It really will matter.
