Community Service Projects

[Steve]

Have anyone of you thought about if you will be doing any community service projects this year? If so what will you be doing? Also how will you promote it so others know you are doing it?

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I used to maintain a football field here and all I wanted in exchange was to recognize me during football games. Well, the school take advantage of me I feel, and ended up scheduling my maintenance around their schedule and not mine. Heck, I was providing approx 4 hours of free service to them, and they couldn't unlock the gates for me the same time, the same day, every week. I have thought before about doing an adopt a house. Where other businesses and myself team up and adopt a house for the year and maintain it for free. It would be a great promotion I feel.

[Steve]

Very interesting story!

What would you think of creating some sort of house and yard makeover. Where you get a couple of other contractors to pool their resources to help a family in need.
Then you could contact the paper and tell them you will provide certain services in return for them promoting the event, collecting entries into the makeover and then choosing a winner.
Maybe have people write in to the paper to tell them about their story and the one who they feel could benefit most from your services could be chosen.

I actually thought that the only way people can get enter for the contest they have to donate like $10 to the local community action agency or something. That way others can benefit from this as well and not just one family

[Steve]

That is a very intersting idea! I never thought about that.

Also, how about doing this for a service man who is away in Iraq now? Do you think that would be better?

That is a possiblity.

There are two options that I am thinking about with this whole adopt a house thing:

1. *To enter the contest a person must submit their house for a make over (so basically it must be a house in major desire to be made over)

or

2. *Anybody can enter, and they donate the $10 for a entry fee which goes towards the local organization.

I am kind of torn between the two. *Because we could help out one particular person with a bad property, or we could help out a lot of people with the donations. The only problem is that the person that wins might not really need a make over or I should say doesn't deserve one

[Steve]

I was thinking about this more.

I think it might be difficult the first time around to get people into this without this ever happening in the past. Maybe it would be easier for you to do this if you just asked around town or put up a flyer at a store about this.
Then just choose someone and promote what you are doing to your local paper, put it on your website and also maybe in your door hanger.
That might really help you stand out as a community oriented business.

Then next year, you can show what you already did and learn from it and possibly make it bigger with the other ideas you said.

What do you think of that?

The first time Keep It Simple?

[bcflawnlandscape]

Do you think this would work with teaming up w/other LCO's in the area? This would make the cost less and still allow you to get the recognition, however the recognition would go to say 2 or 3 LCO's instead of just 1. I told my wife about the idea, which is brilliant by the way, and she said that she wouldn't team up w/anyone else because it would take "opportunity" away from my biz. I looked at it the other way with people in the community looking at it as: " they teamed up with others to make things better in the community" instead of trying to undercut the competition i'd be teaming up w/them to help beautify the community and help those less fortunate! What do you think of this?

Well, my idea would be:
1. I would handle the fertilization/weed control of the property
2. Have a hydroseeder
3. landscaping installation company
4. lawn maintenance company
5. hardscapes company
6. Excavating company to bring in black dirt and soil
7. Hardware store: Supply the fertilizer
8. Nursery: Supply the plants and material

And then have perhaps others that even if they are not doing the work, but being able to supply the material

[Steve]

I think at least initially this would be a lot easier to put together if you just did one project and kept it to a size you could handle yourself. Then once you do that, you could scale it up and become known in your area as the local business owner who really helps out the community.

What would be something rather simple to do yet have great end results?

Could it even be something as simple as a yard clean up, cut and new seed planted or fertilized? It could give you great before and atfer picutres.

It hopefully wouldnt take too long and the project could be finished and you could move on to helping someone else out.