All the cool kids are doing it

Peer pressure can be a good thing. 

I loved reading Contagious by Jonah Berger. He talks about what makes an idea (or product or YouTube video) go viral. And one of the key components is visibility. It has to be something you can see. It has to be tangible. 

Since 2010 we've been taking a lot of pictures of our events. We post the pictures to Flickr, Instagram and Twitter. We include them in blog posts, on our website, in presentations, and in enewsletters. These are pictures of our community, of the people who were in the room and a part of a regional conversation. For our conferences we have a paid photographer. Otherwise it's me or other staff with a DSLR or an iPhone. We capture the energy of the event and the diversity (or lack thereof... a topic for future post) of the attendees. You can scroll through the pictures and see friends, funders, potential employers, colleagues, previous co-workers, and others you know or want to know. You will see the Bay Area land conservation scene.

This simple act has had a huge impact on the growth of our organization. Our Gatherings and conferences sell out in advance. They've become so popular that we now charge non-members $25 to attend. Our conference outgrew its cozy home of 15 years - in May 2014 we squeezed 425 people into a space comfortable for 300. We'll move to a bigger space in 2015. This translates into dollars - we increased conference sponsorship by 5 times in 4 years. Event attendees work on a variety of issues - not just land conservation - including urban planning, food production, technology, outdoor education, public health and more. Elected officials and funders attend. We have a ways to go before you could call our events racially or ethnically diverse, but we've definitely improved over the past 4 years. 

I'd love to see more attendees take pictures and share them via social media. It'd be cool if our website profiled more photos from our events. I wonder if there are other photography websites or social media tools we could explore. I am sure that if we spent some time tagging our photos we'd get more views and a bigger reach. 

There's a lot more we could do. But for now, scrolling through the albums on Flickr sure is fun...