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 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. As merchants who felt the electricity generated by our PR Firm, they will show the honor and support they feel for the cyclists who use their roads with worthy cost savings offerings.
Nor is our NBG Merchandise Discount program an afterthought, a membership add-on that we included because that is how most memberships are structured. Not so. Our merchandise discount program is an important part of broadening the influence of our message, increasing the size of our family. It gives as many businesses as possible a stake in our safely being able to get to their front door.
It is so important, in fact, that we have written a whole chapter about it <link>. Once you read it, you will have a better understanding of why the price reductions we are asking our vendors to offer will make it easier for us to sell them into our program. It will become plainly evident that this is so because of the name recognition our PR Firm will have created for us.
With the help of our public relations people, NBG Member cyclists will also be seen as pedal enthusiasts governed by big thoughts, who think nationally as they ride locally. Because 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, everyone, from all walks of life, 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 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, 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 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, 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 <link>. Like the riders talking about how a PR Firm could take their efforts to a whole new level taken from "How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, the National Bicycle Greenway in Action”, the Mayors' Ride segment is also a dialogue excerpt from that book.
Once Transamerica rides on our route and through our NBG cities become a TV documented phenomena, NBG Membership will soar. 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.
Instead of our operating in a vacuum, 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 we are building for them <link>.
Graphically beautiful, it will cause many to join just so they can be seen in there. In promoting our membership, a PR Firm will show for the public to see, that our vision is of interest to people from all walks of life, all ages and all ethnicities. It will be the bios and pictures they see at this page we are developing that will have the effect of convincing those not yet tuned in yet, that there is a broad array of people who want to see our National Bicycle Greenway become real. And that to be a part of the new cool, they need to join them.
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 our numbers grow, because a PR Firm is promoting us, merchants along the way of our Downtown Greenway and corporations from all over America will take added notice. Growing membership numbers 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 show you in the chapter we have written about it <link>, 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.
Once we get beyond the initial stages of causing our membership to swell, we hope to have 200,000 members by 2026, a PR Firm will take a different approach when we have to raise our rates. So that we can offer the lodging discount program (to hostel rates) discussed in another chapter in this book <link>, 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 has caused bicycles to displace the number of cars on the road within the downtown city confines, it will pique the interest of 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, becoming an NBG member will feel like exercising one's duty as a responsible citizen. 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 an immense 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.
By making our Anchor Cities friendly to human powered propulsion, our PR Firm can sell them as tourist destinations similar to those found in exotic far away lands.
They can use our lodging program to show young families that they are 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 get to know one another. And as we do, we come to realize our own needs, wants and desires are all so similar.