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

[Matthew Whiting (mewhiting]

I did a strawbale and earth plaster demonstration at our green living
festival in Provo, UT this year.  Our forming cohousing group had a booth
across from the demonstration and I don't think we will see anyone join the
group from the effort, but we certainly did some good networking.  For
instance, I spent a good deal of time speaking with an intern who is working
in the planning dept in one of the neighboring cities and he passed on that
the head of the planning dept would be excited about both straw bale
building and cohousing.  I met a rancher whose father had supplied straw for
a bale house about an hour and a half south of Provo that I didn't know
exited.  I spoke with a man living in Provo that had built and lived in a
strawbale house for a couple years who said he would be willing to help us
get building permits passed through if we decided to build some straw bale
in the cohousing community.  There were plenty of other connections made.

The crowd at the festival was quite small as there was a Wind Festival going
on that same day in a neighboring city to celebrate the completion of a wind
farm they just got up and running this summer. We couldn't be at both based
on lack of man-power but maybe next year.

-Matt Whiting, Provo Utah
Utah Valley Commons (forming)


On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:35 PM, Fred H Olson <fholson [at] 
cohousing.org>wrote:

>
> 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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