Like They Did for the Apple Steves, a PR Firm Can Celebrate NBG Family Members
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, with but great exception, almost everyone who hears I'm working on such a thing is happy to hear that.
But it has not become a reality 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, a groundswell of businesses and people will wonder what can be done to make it a reality. Learning that there is a plan in place, this book, to make it real, they will open up their checkbooks to 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 with such great fervor 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, I am running the PR Firm excerpt in this book as a separate chapter. With regard to the PR Firms that so successfully pushed the Apple, and thereby computers in general, into the main stream, they did so by building 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 similar treatment. The heroes we can point to are the scouts who helped us to establish our route across America (HERE are our 2004 NBG Scouts).
They can even use my story, a story that 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, in such a way that it communicates how I feel so indebted to bicycling that I have given three decades of my life 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 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.