How a PR Firm will Cause NBG Membership to Skyrocket
It is the buzz our PR firm will create that will make having an NBG Membership 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 feel accepted by the local business communities they ride through because many of the merchants along their way will also feel this electricity.
These purveyors of goods and services will feel called to support all those affiliated with us with worthy discounts. Nor will our merchandise discount program be an afterthought, a membership add-on that we included because that is how most memberships are structured. Not so. Our merchandise discount program is such an important part of broadening the influence of our message that you will see why this is so in the chapter we have written about it. Even the price reductions we are asking our vendors to offer will be easier to sell because of the name recognition our PR firm creates for us.
NBG Member cyclists will be seen as pedal enthusiasts governed by big thoughts, who think nationally as they ride locally. Because being a part of our juggernaut will also say that our members are doing something for the environment, everyone, from all walks of life, including merchants, whether they ride or not, will feel the push to be included. It will feel like being a part of a family where everyone is just helping each other clean up the planet and get down the two and three wheel road a little bit easier.
Toward the end of getting our efforts talked about, for example, our PR firm can use the media to get narratives out there about the benefits of having an NBG Membership. 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 generate a short story account of an NBG family vacation on a bicycle. 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 they place in news accounts on a weekly basis. The American public will take an interest in them and feel compelled to support the same businesses that these travelers frequent. As all the other merchants in these areas benefit, the businesses this family chooses will be ones that we organize 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. And then when they are actually on the road, they 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 that this plan calls for resurrecting. Our Mayors' Ride campaigns are a perfect forum for such a television broadcast. So perfect, in fact, that, we have devoted a whole chapter to this possibility. It is also a dialogue excerpt from "How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, the National Bicycle Greenway in Action”.
Once Transamerica rides on our route and through our NBG cities become a TV documented phenomena, NBG Membership will soar. It will become prestigious to have an NBG membership. “As seen on TV” will take on new meaning for cyclists on our route in and between our Anchor Cities.