Food for Thought: A Case Study
February 27th, 2008By Marijean Jaggers
Last night, I was a host at a local restaurant for a “dining out” event to support the Charlottesville Community Scholarship Program. We called the event “Food for Thought” and invited five restaurants to participate by donating a percentage of the evening’s take to the Program if we promoted the event enough to fill the house on a Tuesday night in February. We also had board members and local “celebrity” guest hosts at each restaurant, informing the patrons about the Program and how the cost of their meal would help a Charlottesville student with a college scholarship.
Full disclosure: this idea was directly borrowed from the tremendously popular Dining Out for Life event put on by the St. Louis Effort for AIDS. Dining Out for Life is one of the most successful St. Louis fundraisers and it occurred to me that Charlottesville, with its vibrant dining culture and passion for education, was a perfect city in which to replicate the Dining Out event. Thus, Food for Thought was born.
Not all the precincts restaurants have reported as I write this, but at my restaurant, the event was a big success. (Special thanks to Tim Hulbert, Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce president who was the celebrity host at The Shebeen).
As board members, we relied on volunteers to get the word out; mostly, people involved with the Program invited friends to the restaurants. Beyond that, we distributed a news release and gained news stories on two local television stations and on news radio during prime drive time. More than half of the restaurant patrons reported that they’d heard about the event from one of these sources.The social media success of the story happened when a few local blogs picked up the event, (OK, to be fair, that last one’s mine) further spread by our fabulous Charlottesville blog aggregator. There were bloggers and blog readers at Food for Thought!
Thanks to the Charlottesville Community Scholarship board for making this special event happen, and to everyone in the community who came out to support this cause, who helped spread the word and who contributed to the Program, providing scholarships for eligible students in the city of Charlottesville.
