Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Green Festivals and cohousing

[Fred H Olson (fholson]

Ann Zabaldo wrote:

> for 4-5 years Mid Atlantic Cohousing had a booth at the Washington
> DC Green Festival organized by Coop America. HUGE event, lots of booth
> traffic BUT we got very little in terms of "conversion" rate -- that is,
> no interested parties converted to "prospects" and ergo, no prospects
> converted to members.

Certainly such events are more effective at general publicity than
recruiting new members.  And organizing an effective booth that can
comptete for attention amongst all the others is difficult. I would assume
that a fairly small percentage of the attendees are considering moving at
all at the time time of a given festival.

But it is hard to tell what the longer term results are.  The next time
people who learned something about cohousing at such an event are in a
position to move - maybe to another region they may consider cohousing
then - maybe years later.  Or when a specific proposal is made they will
be more open to considering it and maybe it will fill their needs enough
to consider an unplanned move.

Basically I'd argue that it is very difficult to judge the longer term
results of such outreach.  Of course the cost / benefit of such outreach
has to be taken into consideration. (I dont know the cost of participating
in our local event.)  I wonder what preivious contact with cohousing have
tour participants have typically had.  I assume people who move to
cohousing have had multiple contacts with the idea before the seriously
become involved.

Fred, in Minneapolis where we still have so little cohousing developed
that we'd be hard pressed to organize a tour.

--
Fred H. Olson  Minneapolis,MN 55411  USA        (near north Mpls)
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