The Kansas City Direct Marketing Association (better known as the KCDMA for obvious reasons — it’s a mouthful!) is one of Kansas City’s oldest marketing associations. Based in a start in direct mail, it’s real focus is any direct marketing, meaning one-to-one, measurable marketing. Today, they feature educational and networking opportunities for marketers in direct mail, direct response TV/Radio, email marketing, search engine marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and more.

Membership: $150 for individual or $399 for a company (see website for details)
Activities: a monthly luncheon with a featured speaker, monthly happy hours sometimes with content and sometimes just for fun and an annual DM Days conference with speakers from across the country.
Awards: dubbed the “AMBIT” Awards, submissions take place in Dec/Jan and winners are announced at the show in March.
Who’s involved: membership is about 250 people from agencies or client-side marketing departments and about half the event attendance is vendors for copywriting, printing, strategic services or tools. (My company, emfluence, for example provides email marketing services for the club itself and I sit on the KCDMA board.)

Look to get involved in the KCDMA if you’re:

• a direct marketer (email, search,  social, mobile, direct mail, etc)
• looking for regular, high-quality educational content on what’s new and working in marketing in general
• looking for direct marketing services (copywriting, printing, email service provider, etc.)
• looking for a job in direct marketing

Learn all about the KCDMA at http://kcdma.org or follow them on Twitter @kcdma