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Re: Using the internet to sign-on shareholders



Another great area of discussion.
As it evolved over this last year almost all of the communication between
our shareholders and the farm took place over the internet.  Since we
market to people at their workplace and since almost every office is
connected to the internet, this works out fine.  Our weekly newsletter goes
out on e-mail. We send out the veggie list for the day on e-mail. This part
of it works great ( out of 100 shareholders about 95 are hooked up to the
internet).

Sales - last year we conducted our original sales campaign with faxes.  We
have the fax numbers to a large list of offices and organizations and we
would send out a fax each week beginning in March with information. Most of
the follow up and sales were conducted by e-mail.
This coming season we don't expect to have to work as hard on sales. We did
a much more thorough campaign to retain shareholders and this shareholder
base is proving great at getting us new shareholders (we have several new
offices signed up because happy shareholders moved on to new jobs and
recruited their new office mates).

We are, though, interested in coming up with ways of contacting new
potential customers through the internet (we have now adapted our brochure
as an e-mail message). We suspected that a lot of the faxes just got tossed
in the trash rather than posted on the bulletin board as we suggested.

Here's an interesting note. Two years ago we handed out our membership
flier in front of a local Fresh Fields (part of the Whole Foods mega corp)
and the next day we got a call from their lawyer threatening bodily harm if
we did it again. We, of course, told him to carefully fold up our flier and
then gently ram it up his nose. This is the same corporation that does its
best to put food coops our of business while fighting unions and
encouraging the exploitation of farmworkers. Unfortunately, we did not have
a high success ratio with handing out fliers, or putting fliers on
windowshields.  This proved to be a poor use of our time and money. (We did
get an AP article about us that was published in about 90 newspapers. One
of the cars we put a flier on belonged to the reporter and he called us up
and wrote the story).

Kirsten Saylor wrote:

> I am wondering what experiences people have had using the internet to
> attract potential customers and then having them sign-on.  Some
> questions -- how many hits became inquiries for more info?  How many of
> these turned into shareholders?  How did it work out with having
> shareholders sign on through the internet?  Do you see the internet as a
> tool for gaining membership?
>
> Thanks!  Kirsten
>
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