As They Did for Computers, How a PR Firm will Get the NBG into the Mainstream
13 - As They Did for Computers, How a PR Firm will Get the NBG into the Mainstream
One of the biggest component pieces to making a coast-to-coast National Bicycle Greenway a reality, is for our organization to retain the services of a top-flight Public Relations Firm. It is rare the person who does not agree with me that a National Bicycle Greenway would be a great thing for America. In fact, over the last 30+ years of my pushing for the NBG, people from all walks of life are always happy when they hear that I am working on such a thing.
But it has not become an actuality because there are no dollars pushing it. And yet if we can get a Public Relations Firm saturating the media with why such a bicycle arterial is important, and how it can revitalize America, a groundswell of businesses and people will wonder what can be done to make it real. Learning that there is a plan in place, this book, to bring it about, they will open up their checkbooks to help usher it into form.
In my book “How America Can Bike and Grow Rich” (HBGR), I talk about Chiat Day, BBDO and Regis McKenna. Three high profile Public Relations Firms, they promoted Apple Computer so strategically precise that they helped usher the computer industry into form. Because I was in Europe when I wrote HBGR and it got so little play here, this book closes with a fun dialogue excerpt about PR Firms from that publication.
With regard to the PR Firms it talks about that so successfully pushed the Apple, and thereby computers in general, into the mainstream, one of their tactics was to build the human element into it. They lionized its two founders, the two Steves. They turned two regular, working class guys into modern day folk heroes who could do no wrong.
For the National Bicycle Greenway we need a similar game plan. The heroes we can point to are the scouts who helped us to establish our route across America (complete with pictures, names and bios, HERE is the complete list of our 2003 NBG Scouts). In the top right, in the partial representation of our riders, for example, is Bob Ornelas. As Mayor of Arcata, CA, armed with his city’s NBG Day proclamation, he visited with other California Mayors on our behalf, as he rode 300 miles to our 7 San Francisco Bay Mayors' Ride receptions.
A PR Firm can even use my story, a story that, before it became a book, reached 40 million people on my last bike ride across America in 1986. They can rebrand, "Awake Again, all the Way Back from Head Injury”, the book my ride gave authority to. They can re-package it in such a way that it communicates the story it really tells. How I feel so indebted to bicycling that I have given the energy of the comeback it made possible to a bike way that connects the coasts.
In showing how the regular every day person will benefit from the bikeway we foresee, there are other heroes they can point to. There are the individuals who will have used our roads and paths to lose epic amounts of weight, stabilize a heart condition or address issues such as Parkinson's disease which bicycling is known to keep to a minimum.
And even before we consider all the benefits of biking on the NBG, a publicist operation can help us just celebrate how the individual is benefited from the virtue of bicycling. They can help us give the garden variety cyclist on the street a voice for the peace and tranquility that has come into their lives by making the bicycle their choice of recreation and transportation. They can circulate human interest stories to show how the bicycle has improved the sense of well-being for all those who have adopted the two wheel lifestyle. By saturating the airwaves with all of the many ways many different types of people are benefited by the pedal machine, all those who tune in will see how the bicycle is a universal tool we can all use to live more complete and fulfilling lives.
It is here that by extension a critical mass of people will push for safe places to move about under their own power. By default, the universal mindset that results for worthy biking turf will add urgency to the genuine need for our National Bicycle Greenway.
Inside, a growing cross-section of people will know that a National Bicycle Greenway will raise the profile of cycling in general and more specifically for all those who use it. They know this attitude will find its way into the minds of motorists. They know wherever it is that they may be out biking that the NBG will confer respect upon cyclists from all those who choose to move about in cars and trucks. This is so, because our PR Firm will have established biking as an honorable activity that deserves the highest of regard, esteem and appreciation.
We need for people to be shown the colossal benefits of outfitting our Anchor Cities between the coasts with adult bicycle playgrounds. We need for people to see how all the major cities we have designated will all massively benefit from the Downtown Greenways we will be building in them. These are the stories that our publicists need to get into the news pages and not the rampant violence people do to one another. If news editors had a steady diet of positive NBG narratives to choose from, such light and joy would displace much of the low vibration darkness that monopolizes the airwaves.
And then there are the severe climate catastrophes that are becoming a regular occurrence thanks in large part to how we choose to move about. We hear in the news media about all the horrible weather events caused by climate change. But we hear very little about ways we can address its torturous inevitability, an inevitability that will knock the planet off its axis. In his documentary, “Planet of the Humans”, Michael Moore was labeled a pariah because he had the audacity to infer that the use of electric energy is not reducing our use of fossil fuel.
We are fooling ourselves, as Moore states, to think we are doing our part by driving electric cars, scooters or motorized bicycles. All of which have their basis in oil. Even our supposedly clean sources of fuel such as wind, biomass and solar energy, etc. are not possible, as he shows in his film, without fossil fuel. All of which brings me to a point. We have to return to the simple pedal machine.
It is here that a Public Relations Firm can help bring this about. And we can do that in a way that is fun. In showing how we plan to turn the Anchor Cities that stand between San Francisco and Washington DC into bicycle playgrounds, a skilled PR Firm can hold Indianapolis up as an example. They can show how downtown Indianapolis has been revitalized by the world renowned Cultural Trail around which this book is epicentered. Ten miles in length, it is the only Downtown Greenway in the world.
Nor are we just talking about the health of the planet, we are also talking about the health of the individual. We need to put the message of fitness that bicycling brings before a very sick Nation (America is rated #35 out of 169 countries in terms of overall citizen health and ranks 26th in terms of life expectancy). Sadly, ours is a Nation made up of men and women who do not use their bodies to get places. We need a PR Firm to make it cool to use our legs once again. In the same way that US President, John Kennedy's Presidents Council on Physical Fitness made physical conditioning the dominant mantra in the early 1960’s - we need an image management company to make vibrant health the dominant desire for a country that has lost its way.
The many billionaires there are on the planet now, more often than not are looking for a way to spend their money in a way that will make a difference for humankind. What better way could there be to do so than to underwrite a Public Relations Firm that will celebrate the bicycle/exercise?
Instead of using a Public Relations Firm to sell war, even cigarette smoking, as has sadly been the case in the past, they can be used to help people learn that exercise will help them feel better about themselves and the world around them.
If a PR Firm hammers away at the importance of being fit, people will realize that they can satisfy this need by just moving about under their own power When this happens, their body’s will demand better fuel, by default people will begin eating better. Not only will using their muscles to get places reduce the tension life brings, because it betters their performance in all that they do, as it makes them feel more alive and at peace, they will feel drawn to healthier foods. When a fast food diet is minimized, people will feel less agitated. Combined with the endorphins of exercise, it is this that will help speak to the violence problems and mass shootings that have become commonplace.
Beyond relying only on seed money to get the exercise message out there for a season, or a few seasons, we have devised ways that we can do so on a year-round basis. Instead of only having this communication out there for a short period of time, our programs will make it profitable to drive this consciousness deep into the American psyche from one day to the next. Such repetition will also turn into consistent cash flow for us and for all those who help us with financial support.
If we can get a Public Relations Firm to saturate the media with human interest stories about cycling, it will build a firestorm of interest in our many programs. They will have the leverage they need to convince print, web, TV and radio venues to accept their non-paid promotional stories because of the advertising buys we will have made it possible for them to make. We will have built this cost into the budget we create for their service. Here are some of the ways a Public Relations Firm can do that/help us.
NBG Membership
It is the buzz our PR Firm will create that will make having an NBG Membership (see the NBG Membership chapter) the next level of cool. All bike riders will want to be able to say they are aligned with us because it will represent them as legitimate card-carrying cyclists. Cyclists who will also know they are accepted by the local business communities they ride through because of all the discounts these purveyors of goods and services offer to them. The honor and support these merchants feel for the cyclists who use their roads will be driven in part by the electricity generated by our PR firm.
By lending its muscle to our NBG Merchant Discount program, a PR Firm will broaden the influence of our message. In doing so, they will add the merchant community to our family. This is so because, as we said in the chapter we wrote about this program, it will give as many businesses as possible a stake in our safely being able to get to their front door.
With the help of our PR Firm, NBG Member cyclists will also be seen as pedal enthusiasts governed by big thoughts, who think nationally as they ride locally. Because signposts along the roads and paths our pedalers use will be marked conspicuously with the words, National Bicycle Greenway, their efforts will always be associated with the big picture of our coast-to-coast connection.
Because being a part of our juggernaut will say that our members are also doing something for the environment, large numbers of people, including merchants, whether they ride or not, will feel even more of the push to be a part of our mission. It will feel like being a part of a household where everyone is just helping each other clean up the planet so they can get down the two and three wheel road a little bit easier.
Toward the end of joining our movement, our PR Firm can use the media to get narratives out there about the benefits of having an NBG Membership. In addition to the every day cyclist on the street, a PR Firm can strategically place stories about select NBG Members and touch on their backgrounds in such a way that it builds prestige and honor for those who come into our fold. They can, for example, take sports stars and/or celebrities and communicate how biking on our roads and paths is an important part of their lives.
A creative news alerting agency can spend a summer with an NBG family doing a coast-to-coast vacation on our route. The cities they visit, the sites they see, the hotels they stay in, the restaurants they eat at, etc., can all be made a part of the summer series our publicists make newsworthy on a weekly basis. The American public will take an interest in these travelers and feel compelled to support the same businesses that they patronized. As all the other merchants in these areas benefit, the businesses this family chooses will be ones that our sales teams will have organized with in advance.
The following year, the publicists can use a few college kids who have chosen to ride across the USA on our route. Also a weekly series, they can show the route being studied. Little cameos can find them buying the gear they need, outfitting their bikes and figuring out what goes where when they pack them, etc. And then when they are actually on the road, a film crew can accompany them as they shoot pictures of all the various sites they see (that we select, including businesses that we organize with) in our Anchor Cities.
Once our PR Firm establishes interest in such activity, it will engage the interest of a screenwriter who will turn bike trips across America on our route into a weekly television show on a par with the Survivor TV series. Here they can use our annual National Mayors' Rides as we show at the end of this chapter as well as at the end of this book. Since our Mayors' Ride campaigns are a perfect forum for such a television broadcast., we may deliberate upon resurrecting them in Book 2.
Once Transamerica rides on our route and through our NBG cities become a TV documented phenomena, NBG Membership will grow even more. It will add to the prestige of having an NBG membership. “As seen on TV” will take on new meaning for cyclists on our route in and between our Anchor Cities.
A PR Firm can help us show that we are a diverse and fast growing family. They can disseminate copy about the power of numbers and how we are relying on that concept by pricing our memberships as low as we can. Within the news releases they circulate, our PR Firm can include some of the pictures of our members that will appear on the exciting web that will be an expanded version of the web we are building for people who help ed us get this book written.
When, because of our PR Firm, people see they get a free online copy of this book, they will see that there is a plan in place. And because there is, they will want to get aboard the train. As a function of human nature, people want to be a part of any force for good that knows where it's going.
As a PR Firm helps our numbers grow, merchants along the way of our Downtown Greenway and corporations from all over America will take added notice. Growing membership counts will make it easier for us to sell shopkeepers into our program with, in addition to discounts for our members, advertising positions on our maps. The name recognition a large associateship will guarantee for us, will also make it easier for us to sell higher priced business memberships. And as we will show you in Book 2 in the chapter we will have written called “Owning a Part of the Greenway”, a large membership body will also make it easier for us to sell corporate sponsorship of Greenway Miles, Donor Bricks, Benches, Kiosks and all the other ideas we have for how large enterprises can support us with a physical presence on our right of way..
Once we get beyond the initial stages of causing our membership to swell, we hope to have 200,000 members by 2027, a PR Firm will take a different approach when we have to raise our rates. So that we can activate the lodging discount program (to hostel rates) discussed above, we will have to increase the price of membership. As a result, a PR Firm will then sell the public on how lower priced lodging for NBG Members will make our NBG Anchor Cities better places to be.
When they point out that our lodging discount program will cause bicycles to displace the number of cars on the road within the downtown city confines, it will give purpose to those who have not yet joined. When our PR Firm circulates stories about how because of the prevalence of cyclists, violence and car accidents have decreased, while city tax coffers have increased (because of the increase in sales tax revenues from a busier downtown) becoming an NBG member will feel like exercising one's duty as a responsible citizen. As our program unfolds, when our PR Firm reminds people that a different city has become the result of making it possible for more bicyclists to be downtown, there will be a palpable feeling of pride amongst the local citizenry. As such, it will be proud NBG Anchor City residents who make it easier for us to advance our agenda on many levels.
Our PR Firm can use our lodging program to show families that visiting our cities on a bike is an affordable way to escape the limits of the familiar while they learn about all that is new and exciting in their own country. Instead of feeling called to visit those vacation paradises found in travel magazines, our PR Firm will have made them aware of the wonder that can be found here in America, here in our NBG Anchor Cities.
Because this will cause Americans to take an interest in their fellow countrymen, it will be our PR Firm that will have helped to heal some of the divisions that presently keep us apart. As a growing number of NBG Members learn about their fellow American brothers and sisters, there will be a greater understanding and empathy for those whose geography is different from their own. As a critical mass of NBG Members move about under their own power to slow down the pace of our cities, we will get to know one another. And as we do, we will come to realize our own needs, wants and desires are all so similar.
NBG Lodging
Our PR Firm will make the discounts our hotels offer (see the NBG Lodging chapter) our NBG Members newsworthy. They can draw up press releases that point out how hotels are experiencing an increase in bicycle visitors because of our lodging discount program. Other such submissions can be pictures of the growing numbers of bikes such accommodation brings that are parked at the shopkeepers’ places of business. In the form of quotes, favorable reactions from the merchants can also be included.
The news influencers can also be direct. They can create press releases that are headlined to read -
Bicycle organization offers massively discounted lodging as a way to induce memberships
With such an opening, they can continue to tell our lodging story. To give it added color, they can talk about how cyclists from near and far are benefiting from our program. And how the Anchor Cities themselves are also experiencing many benefits.
NBG Anchor Cities
For the national media, the PR Firm we contract with will celebrate the cities we have chosen (see the Anchor Cities chapter) to hold our route together. They will tell news agencies what makes these cities unique and why cyclists would want to visit them. When these stories get picked up on by the media local to these cities, it will instill even more pride in the citizenry.
And as these local populations see they are being celebrated as worthy of a two-wheel visit, the businesses will take notice. As a result, local merchants will feel they're helping to sell their city by being a part of our program.
PR Firms can also use infrastructure developments as a way to get the coast coast-to-coast NBG message out there. They can use a new bike lane, bike bridge or an improved intersection, etc. as a way to announce the part these improvements will play in making it easier for long distance cyclists to get through their city.
When city mothers and fathers realize they are part of a national/bigger plan, they will feel called to push for better and more exceptional infrastructure for their own cyclists. This will encourage these cities to build our coast-to-coast plan as we build them.
Virtual Tours/Downtown Greenways
A PR Firm can whet the appetite of Anchor City residents for the Virtual Tours that are forthcoming as a way to help us get the Downtown Greenways that will evolve from them built. They can create news stories about the successes our Virtual Tours (see the Virtual Tour chapter) are enjoying in other Anchor Cities. As a form of education, they can use these accounts to explain why our Virtual Tours are important. Among a host of other reasons, they will show how they will bring about an increase in the amount of money that is being spent by the cycle tourists they will bring.
In all the communication they manage to get out, a PR Firm will explain how our Virtual Tours will, in not too long a period of time, give way to Downtown Greenways. They will use our Virtual Tours/Downtown Greenways as a reminder to the Anchor Cities that host them, that they are on the national radar, a part of something much bigger, a part of a coast-to-coast bicycle highway. A chest thumping exercise, these cities can use the Downtown Greenways that are coming their way in many ways.
They can use such publicity to make themselves look appealing to business concerns who may want to locate there. By making noise about the value of a Downtown Greenway, our PR Firm will be helping city officials show large employers that by locating in any one of our Anchor Cities, they can attract and keep the best employees. Our PR Firm will have shown them this is so because they will be able to offer the playground that our Downtown Greenways really are. A PR Firm will show the value of this powerful amenity. They will show the family activity that can take place on it as well as the transportation benefits, etc.
Our PR Firm will show Anchor Cities how their having a Downtown Greenway will also make them look attractive to conventions looking to possibly hold their events there. In doing so, they will work to establish them as places their attendees will want to visit. By telling stories about all the fun people are having on our Downtown Greenways, a PR Firm will add its voice in reminding the local populous that they are part of a bigger mission. They will be reminded that they have been chosen as a city to help us anchor our coast-to-coast bicycle route.
This will give reason and purpose to all the streets that may have to be torn up and inconvenience that may result while our Virtual Tours are in the building phase. When shovels are being turned and news accounts are being circulated about what can be expected from it, the merchants along the way will see its imminent reality. And when they do, they will be far more receptive to becoming a part of the excitement at hand by enrolling in our Merchant Discount program or with an ad buy on our Point Of Interest maps.
In the end, in the same way big cities make innumerable concessions to accommodate sports franchises, the Downtown Greenways we want to bring them will get them all the same benefits and more. And yet instead of asking their citizens to foot the bill, as you will continue to see here, we are bringing them a money maker. As well as an unparalleled recreational venue that will attract people from far and wide.
POI Map Sales
One of the biggest beneficiaries of the promotion work our PR Firm will be doing for the money making programs (Biking Report Cards, Virtual Tours, Merchant Discounts and NBG Membership, etc.) we have built around our Anchor Cities, will be our Points Of Interest maps (see the POI chapter). The buzz that our publicists create will compel the merchants along the way of our route through their town to want to be involved with a presence. It is here that the online form we will have devised will be much used by storekeepers as it brings us a steady stream of currency.
And to additionally empower our POI map sales teams, our Public Relations firm will make advertising buys that promote our maps at supportive websites. On 1/4 page (on average) announcements, bullet items will highlight some of the ways cyclists and the businesses that use them are benefitted.
Because we are spending money with them, many online sites will regularly publish the news releases we create that bring attention to our maps. Smaller display ads with teaser copy will also appear at sites all throughout the web. Associated with links to the map in question, type can be designed with little teasers to say things like -
“See your city on two wheels here”
“_______ supports (city) biking - find them here”
“Building the National Bicycle Greenway”
We can even offer co-op money as a way to get the businesses themselves to place more and even bigger ads for our maps all throughout the web. We can help them pay for such a presence if they say things like -
“More cyclists are finding the safe roads to us on BikeRoute.com"
“Our customers tell us they enjoyed the BikeRoute.com way to our front door”
“Since BikeRoute.com started suggesting a route to us, our business has greatly increased”
Such ubiquitousness will not only drive traffic to our maps and our website, it will also much publicize the mission of the National Bicycle Greenway and make it easier for all of our other programs to do their work. This as it makes it easier for us to attract the best talent to not only get these maps built, but to maintain them. Seeing our map teasers will cause other advertisers, and not just those on our route, to inquire about how they can also get involved.
The all pervasive presence of our map teasers will cause the collective theater of the mind to see the National Bicycle Greenway as as an expected occurrence, a done deal that cannot be stopped. It will be like a freight train that everyone wants to jump on board, to be a part of. The prevalence of our little reminders will stimulate water cooler talk at the office and dinner table talk on the home front. Seeing messages about our maps everywhere will cause an avalanche of people to push for the National Bicycle Greenway they suggest. Making it real will feel like an involuntary, reflexive action for many of the people of this land.
Landscape Developers (Urbanists) Help with Design Contests
As the PR Firm we ultimately contract with bombards the Americans psyche with visions of cyclists rolling along on Downtown Greenways, the public will feel called to make their own suggestions for certain parts of them. For each of our Anchor Cities, our publicists will design contests to bring these possibilities forward. There will be public workshops where these designs can be aired. They will solicit the interest of art schools and college art programs.
Figuratively speaking, lines will form made up of artists trying to get what they propose accepted. This is so because they will know whoever wins will have a very high credential they can point to. The winning design(s) the public brings forward will serve as exciting idea food our developers will then build around.
The messaging from our PR Firm will confer nobility upon the company chosen to build what the public has suggested. Once the local community finally votes on its chosen design(s), they will feel like they have been made a part of the process. And they will applaud the urbanists chosen to bring their ideas to fruition.
As they entrust our urbanists to celebrate the character of the anchor population center at hand with their ideas, they will feel that the Downtown Greenway running through their city is their own. And once it is complete, the ultimate result will fill the hearts of all those of all ages who ultimately get to experience the adult playgrounds our landscape developers will have devised.
PR Firm Can Helps us get the Best out of Landscape Developers
By getting the public involved, this will make our Downtown Greenways a much anticipated resource. Embraced as ann honor, this will cause landscape developing firms to offer us the best proposals they can find it within their capacity to produce (more details in the chapter we have written about them). As a result of the excitement our PR Firm will have created for our vision, these urbanists will offer us many different designs to choose from. What we ultimately select will be much celebrated even while it is being proposed.
Aware of this, the developer artists themselves will scour their industry for solutions that may exist as they plumb the deepest reserves of their inner design mastery to match their skills with what the public wants. There will be a healthy back and forth until the final result is satisfactory to both parties. It is this that will not make this work feel like a job, but a calling, the result of which will make each of our Anchor City travel ways unique as well as attractive.
NBG Biking Report Cards
From 2003 until 2017, as the time and resources allowed, for our California cities we produced NBG Biking Report Cards. We also produced reports for Reno and Salt Lake City. None of them, however, anywhere near achieved any measure of the approbation they deserved. This was so because with our energy spread over many different fronts, we were greatly limited in the data we were then able to collect. If the people responsible for collecting this information for us had thought that these reports would be widely circulated, it would not have been such a struggle to pull together the ones that we did.
As we worked to promote our Anchor Cities from one Mayors’ Ride season to the next with these registers, we often ran out of time getting the information we needed to create and/or update them. With limited manpower or other resources, what we did accumulate often fell off the back of everything else that needed our attention. In the end, that is a tragic development because merchandised appropriately (with also the addition of strong graphics), they have tremendous power. They have so much potential, in fact, that we devoted a whole chapter to them here in this book. Getting these reports known about would be huge. If we had a PR Firm extolling their worth, the bike-ability in the cities they showcase would get national and international attention.
If city transportation officials knew, for example, that what we were asking of them would appear in publications large in scope, they would have been on the lookout for our request. It would have been a priority item for them. They would have felt compelled to get the facts, details, particulars, statistics and other figures we needed together in a timely manner.
With the help of a PR Firm promoting these reports, not only will those responsible feel pushed to get the information we need together, but the data they assemble will be of huge value to a wide variety of interests. People wanting to know what these municipalities are like, will study our Biking Report Cards with great interest. They will draw scrutiny from far more than cyclists alone. Employers looking to locate in these cities, car drivers planning to visit, even Event Planners, etc., will all want to be made aware of the information these reports contain.
Once their value is understood, they will become a year in, year out public document that our Anchor Cities will strive to be seen in in the best possible light. In pushing them, it will be our PR Firm that will have been responsible for their presence as a Wikipedia type resource for all tourists considering a visit.
Because our PR Firm will make them an annual topic in magazines both on and off the web, cities will have a scorecard they can show off nationally. This will have the effect of fostering friendly competition with other Anchor Cities. This as it instills pride in the Public Works departments of each of these population centers.
When, because of our PR Firm, they start appearing in travel guides such as “Fodors” and the “Let’s Go” series, advertisers will take notice. They will want to be seen in them with display ads. With such support, our Biking Report Cards will also become moneymakers for us.
Merchant Discounts
At the end of the 19th century, the bicycle dominated the stream of thought that existed at the time. In the late 1800s the two-wheel pedal machine was a miracle that consumed the creativity of the best minds. In the same way, the computer fostered the business start ups that transformed the world at the end of the 1900’s, one hundred years before, the preponderance of enterprise was busy inventing something for the revolutionary pedal machine.
It changed the way people dressed. In empowering the individual, it also gave women freedom. It brought about the first roads in America. The bicycle was one of the key players in the Industrial Revolution. It monopolized the resources of the most successful businessman. It was everywhere. It stood at the center of the Gay 90s that it brought about, a point in history unlike any other, an era that was quite possibly the happiest, freest time this country has ever known.
A PR firm can return America to the simplicity of that more cheerful and innocent time. By bombarding the mainstream media and the social media with happy stories about bicycling, people will realize that we have the solution to all of the woes that afflict us right here, right now. By belaboring the pedal machine’s capacity to cure emotional, physical and planetary woes, the thought shapers we hire will make it seem that to support its use, as we keep saying, is the logical next step on our path of evolution .
Everyone will want to be a part of the bicycle way. And the way business can be a part of it is to offer NBG Merchant discounts (see the NBG Merchant Discounts chapter) on their merchandise and services. In such a way, the shopkeeping community will become a part of our family.
To add to the bicycle burn they will build, our PR Firm can also circulate stories about the increased cash register activity that bike riders are bringing business purveyors. They can talk about how these merchants do not have to create parking for them. They can talk about how the pedal community also tends to have a higher amount of discretionary dollars they can expend.
By making the bicycle riding public look like a community of people with money to spend that business proprietors will want to get in the door, they will be sure to offer discounts for such privilege. As they do, our PR Firm will alert the public that this is so with news alerts about such offerings. This will have the added benefit of making these merchants look like community minded, green purveyors of commerce.
A PR Firm can go one step further. They can create news stories and the like that suggest that because of all the businesses joining our discount program, that bicycle riding in the city is becoming safer. They can plant the seed for the idea that the merchants in our discount program are also beginning to pay attention to the needs of the cyclist when he or she is on the road with them. Nor will the businesses offering discounts to get us to their doorstep be the only ones tuned into this message. Not in the least.
It will cause greater numbers of people to become more aware of our needs wherever they come in contact with our pedaling efforts. Our public relations people can talk about the fact that this has become so because this way of thinking trickles down from the businesses we patronize, from management to staff and to the customers who all want to make the way easier for us. This as greater numbers of motorists become more and more aware of the need to share the road with all of its users.
Fund Raising, including Check Out Charity
With a PR firm fully saturating the ethers with bicycles and the National Bicycle Greenway opportunity, the way will be easier for us to raise funds on the street itself. One such example is Check Out Charity. When a cashier asks if we would like to round our purchase up to the nearest dollar as a benefit for the NBG, the decision will be easier to make because all the good we're doing we will be a known commodity.
Being known about will also make it easier for the public to support us when stores donate a percentage of sales (commercial co-venture or cause marketing) to nonprofit organizations. Four times a year, Whole Foods, for example, has 5% Community Giving Days. On such days, Whole Foods singles out a local charity that will receive 5% of the sales it makes. It is here our PR firm can help to drive traffic to Whole Foods on these days.
A PR Firm can also let people know they can link to us at the Kroger’s Plus Card. This is a card that every time you use it, a donation is made to the charity that you register it with.
Not many people know this, and our PR firm can help to make this a widespread notion, but since 2004 there has been a charity in place that allows you to donate unused portions of a gift card (e.g., Starbucks, Walmart, North Face) to the nonprofit of your choice. Called CharityChoice, they also have an Honor Card program that our PR Firm can bring attention to. Referred to as the CharityChoice Gift Card, with it you can send a message you can customize with graphics they supply and in your own wording in the name of the National Bicycle Greenway to honor any of these occasions:
Anniversary | Award | Birthday | Celebration | Environment - show your green | Father’s Day | Gift | Graduation. | Holiday | Mother’s Day | New Year’s | Seasons, greetings | Stocking stuffers | Sympathy | Thank You | Valentine’s Day | Wedding
For as little as two dollars through PayPal or a credit card, you can make a donation to us and have the greeting sent in our name to your recipient’s Facebook or email address! This is such a great idea and it makes it possible for most anyone to be able to give to our cause and yet so few people know such a charity option even exists. A PR Firm can bring a lot of attention to this way of giving!
Coming full circle, a PR Firm can even promote Apple Computer as the computer giant helps us. As I touched on in the beginning of this chapter and deliberate upon with an entire chapter of its own, just as three different PR Firms made the Apple a part of our daily lives, our publicists can bring attention to them in a different light. They can talk about how for every dollar an Apple employee donates, Apple matches it with a monetary donation to the same organization.
There are many organizations that have employer matching gift programs that our PR Firm is likely to already have a working relationship with. Patagonia is most likely one of those. Patagonia goes the extra mile by giving one percent of its annual sales to grassroots organizations working to protect our air water and soil.
National Mayors' Rides
A PR firm can also help us publicize the annual National Mayors' Rides we will talk about in Book 2. At this link, you can see that from 2002, until 2018, when we moved our operation to Indianapolis, we ran a relay ride that went from San Francisco to Washington DC. The route it followed, passed through the 18 other NBG Anchor Cities that stand between the coasts. On an annual basis, these rides created a lot of excitement for these cities, their Mayors and their administrations.
Even with our limited staff, because it was so easy to get media attention for these rides, especially on the NBG days we staged at City Halls, a PR Firm can easily turn these into events of great national significance. Because mayoral staffs are often made up of young people who want to make a difference, they are excited we have included their city in our vision. It is this that will make it easier for our PR Firm to also get Council members to show off the infrastructure improvements in their jurisdictions. Always looking for a way to get in front of their constituents, for them this is also a great way for these aldermen to honor the Public Works departments that have made this possible for them.
I hope you can see cyclists are the real winners here. When the Mayor, his or her Council and Public Works are publicly acknowledged for the work they have done for bike riders, there will be incentive on a yearly basis for them to build upon this. As we get better cycling conditions, we will take comfort in the fact that not only is the city a better place to be, but those who made that possible are also honored accordingly.
I hope with this chapter I have been able to show you how a top flight PR Firm can make all of the words in this book a reality!