Can Smoosiers produce a Viral Food Campaign for local producers?

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Comment by john blue on September 15, 2009 at 8:36am

FYI it is #foodchat week on Twitter, Tues. Sept 15, 8-10 pm ET. Topic will be conventional & organic #food - & perceptions of local in system. Share your stories.

Comment by Cindy Dashnaw on March 17, 2009 at 10:21am

If the campaign is to Feed the Hungry, then it makes sense to me to partner with an organization that's already doing that, such as Wheeler Mission. Too often in the non-profit world, a lot of time and energy goes into creating yet another 501c3 when one already exists. If the power of Smaller Indiana could be harnessed to benefit an existing organization that really needs help with social media, then we could create something that lasts much longer than one event and one year.

Comment by Sage McGreen on March 10, 2009 at 12:10pm

Pat,

Amazingly enough there are Smoosiers that are promoting the Tyson Feed the Hungry Campaign. I just got email asking for my participation. That's what is so frustrating about seeking truth in this information age. I believe everyone has good intentions, but huge corporations have already tainted us with hypocrisy.

I'm very impressed with your willingness to do for others. I'm still committed to help with animation, and once you get some ideas hammered out I'll donate a portion of my talent and time. However, I need to be honest and say - this "viral campaign" is getting very large and complicated. The mission is confused and there is alot of volunteer work involved. Honestly, I don't have the time or interest for shopping, cooking, or donating manpower to feed anyone at the Wheeler Mission. I'll help do other things once you decide your direction.

In our earlier conversations you had mentioned local foods for schools - I did some research and found a non-profit program already established called Farm to Schools The state of Indiana only has one school participating, and that's very sad indeed.
IC 20-26-9 Chapter 9. School Breakfast and Lunch Programs gives funds to School lunch and breakfast programs. The code just revised on 3/10/2009 by our State Government has coined the term "Better Choice Foods" and will reward "vendors" school contracts on this criteria. I say let's give Mitch Daniel what he wants. Smoosiers should work with the FarmtoSchool.org and go viral with this mission. Let's tell our state government how to spend our tax dollars to feed our kids at school. This certainly feels more empowering than starting another feed the hungry campaign, and who trusts the government to spend money wisely? Not me, not now.

I have already established myself as a green parent rep. for Indiana at The Green Parent . PTA contacts are easy to come by, and I can network with other mothers for this idea to go viral. I found a cute campaign Digital Red Nose for UK comic relief and like how it marks your online participation with a red nose. It's simple and very interactive.

These are my thoughts, if you want to adopt any of my ideas let me know.

Comment by Elaine Voci on March 9, 2009 at 2:27pm

Thanks, Bernard and Faith, for enlightening me - and others - on this subject. I appreciate being given some firsthand insights. Being manipulated is something we should avoid as a group so that when we do throw our weight behind an issue, it has an impact worth pursuing and the potential to do some real good. Perhaps some of you read the NYTimes, too; they have been including articles about this same topic in the past few months and have warned readers not to confuse organic with food that is necessarily the best choice to make. As Bernard points out, sometimes "regular" food is just as healthy a choice to make as organic.

Comment by Pat Coyle on March 9, 2009 at 12:11am

It's feeding the hungry with local foods rather than mass produced foods...and trying to use social media to drive engagement.

Comment by Lynn Jenkins on March 8, 2009 at 10:25pm

Hmmm...It's a very mixed message...Is this a LOCAL FOODS campaign? Or is it a FEED THE HUNGRY Campaign? May I suggest sticking with one concept or the other? ...a lot less confusing!
Perhaps staying with the 2009 theme, we could have 2,009 people commit to eating local food for one (meal, day, week, month etc) or commit to serving 2,009 meals to hungy Hoosiers. To do both will be not only confusing to the public, but very difficult to accomplish (especially as a 'sideline' campaign).

Comment by Karen Mangia on March 8, 2009 at 10:16pm

This may be an incredibly simple approach to viral marketing. Take a trip to your local farmers' market and to several local farms. Invite friends and colleagues over for a dinner in your home. When they rave about the delicious food, share with them how you procured it. You don't even need a video camera for what may be better characterized as good, old school grass roots, word of mouth. Also, there are many local blogs already produced that can help with this. Post the links here, on your Facebook account in My Space!

Comment by Pat Coyle on March 8, 2009 at 9:55pm

Everyone here has great ideas...and clearly the issues are more numerous than one single campaign can address let alone solve. I'd like to bite off a project we can actually accomplish...something with a beginning, middle and end like the Tyson and Quaker promotions. Sage and I were going back and forth yesterday with an idea that I'd personally like to work on...and in the interest of everyone's time, I suggest we start with this idea, and hopefully move on to bigger and better things over time....I don't have a clever name for it yet, but here's the outline:

Goal: Serve 2,009 home grown, home cooked meals in 2,009

We make a very public effort to enlist the folks of Smaller Indiana in a campaign to feed (on average) one hungry person each day during the course of this year. We will support the local economy and local food producers by purchasing as much of the food as possible from local farmers. This could include: milk, eggs, cheese, poultyr, meet, produce, honey, etc. We would raise money through donations from members of Smaller IN and others sympathetic with our cause. Smoosiers would contribute microdonations ($1, $5, $10, $20 each), and Smaller Indiana will donate $1 for every individual donation made up to $1,000. So we need a little viral magic to get 1,000 people to make donations!!

Here are some of the things I think we'll need:

1. A non-profit fiscal partner to accept the tax deductible donations

2. A partnership with an agency that has kitchens and facilities to serve food to hungry people (like Wheeler, Shepherd Community Ctr, Unleavened Bread). This might be the very same organizaiton that acts as fiscal agent. One other thought: we might consider partnering with a school...under the notion that kids are better able to learn when they're eating a healthy diet. Just a thought.

3. Identify local producers - we need to figure out what we want to serve and where we're going to purchase it.

4. Grocery sponsor? Should we seek help for Kroger or Whole Foods or Marsh...they could help us raise mone by promoting the campaign in their stores...they could also help fill in some items we're not able to get locally (as needed). And they could donate cash too :-)

5. Volunteers - we're going to need shopers, cooks, servers, writers, photographers, Web developers, servers, bandwidth, video, etc.

6. Strategist - we need someone to really tie down the beginning, middle and end of this thing...turn it into a tight campaign with measureable objectives...and that really goes VIRAL (DRIVE AWARENESS, VOLUNTEERS AND DONATIONS).

7. Microsite - to house the campaign and document all proceedings...this site might include photos from the event, comments from producers and volunteers, links to producers and other useful local food resources, etc.

8. Widgets - Some electronic coolness that empowers the community to help spread the word

I suggest we schedule a face to face meeting to allow all intersted in participating a chance to get involved. We could iron out the details, folks can volunteer for the roles they want to play...and we can be off and running.

I will set this meeting 3 weeks out to give everyone a chance to fit it into their schedules.

Then maybe we should create a group for the folks who want to help with this campaign...that way we can keep the dialog centered in one place and we'll have the ability to message eachother as needed. I like the idea of a wiki, but since I've never used one, I think it might cost more time thant it's worth at this point.

That's all my Sunday night brain can think of right now...I'm certainly open to everyone's input...I just know that we can waste time talking and trying to incorporate too many moving parts...if we set out to do one little thing, we may find we get to do a lot more thins in the long run...so please let me know if you think this idea is good enough for our first effort...I know Sage is already in...who else is with us?

Comment by Jeb Banner on March 8, 2009 at 5:50pm

I think using our collective influence and resources to put pressure on local groceries to buy local may produce results. I often wonder how far something has traveled to get to my dinner plate. Maybe we could design a "Locally Grown" sticker that could go next to meat and veggies, etc that are within 100 miles or so of Indianapolis. Does such a thing exist? I see it advertised sometimes in stores- local strawberries.

Lynn is right, the consumer also needs to be educated to want local produce. That will create the best results.

Comment by Don Schindler on March 8, 2009 at 5:10pm

I'm willing to help with what I can on the social media and strategic planning side. Maybe we should set up a wiki outside of smallerindiana.com to put the campaign together. This way we can all participate without having to dig back and forth through the forum stuff. Just an idea.

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