Earth Day, Acronyms and Gert the Cow

I’m on United Flight 365, somewhere between Newark and Denver after a week on the East Coast. It has been a great week with a lot of variety. I started last Thursday in Madison, NJ where I did a presentation at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports (BRMS). I had a small, but in enthusiastic audience—quite a few staff from the store, a few enrolled students and their parents and couple of curiosity seekers interested in seeing some cool pictures and learning more about NOLS. As always the BRMS staff in the store were great. They always take great care of us and I am always impressed by how well they know their customers. There is a real family feeling in all of their shops.

On Friday I ventured into New York City where I caught up with the NOLS Bus and crew—Zandy, Curtis and Amy. Matthew and Cara also came out from Lander to help handle the Earth Day New York throngs.

The bus was parked on Vanderbilt Street, the west entrance to Grand Central Station. Friday was filled with school groups who came down to visit the exhibits, others who came to visit Earth Day festivities and lot of folks who stopped by while on their way to catch a train. I had an opportunity to catch up with Rick Hunt the marketing VP at a cool organization called Sharedbook. Headquartered out of Tel Aviv, they have developed an elegant online scrapbooking sort of product that could be great for NOLS students. A film crew also visited us from The Weather Channel who was there to take some “B Roll” of the Bus.

Saturday brought a downpour. Perfect for the Weather Channel’s live broadcasts from the NOLS Bus! Matthew took the early shift and was interviewed at 7:30 am. I did the 9:30 shift. A few of the people who stopped by the bus later in the day and said they had seen us on TV. We were lucky to have made it on. Meteorologist Stephanie Abrams and her crew were having technical difficulties right up until the time we were supposed to go live.

In spite of nasty weather we were busy all day. All of us were using all of our best NOLS tricks to stay warm in the cold, wet weather. It was family day at the NOLS Bus. Cara’s Mom and Dad came down from Rochester and Zandy’s Mom made it down from Boston to visit while we entertained the New York City throngs. By the end of the day more than 1,500 catalogs found good homes.

Sunday I split off from the NOLS Bus and headed up to New Hampshire. The rain continued—hard, making a four and half hour drive into a six hour slog. I started out Monday at the Student Conservation Association (SCA) visiting with Kevin Hamilton, the communications guy for SCA. Kevin and I have teamed up on a session at the Wilderness Risk Managers Conference for the last five years. SCA has a beautiful location right along the Connecticut River in Charlestown, NH. Kevin gathered a few members of his team together and we traded some war stories about our attempts to spread our respective organizations missions and increase our recognition.

From SCA I headed over to Peterborough, NH to catch up with Gary Ehlers at Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS). We updated each other on current initiatives at our organizations. We are working to bring the EMS stores on board as NOLS Preferred Retailers. We had hit a bit of a logjam. But I believe that has now been broken. We look forward to welcoming this flagship outdoor chain into the fold soon.

Tuesday—Boston, Mass. I had an opportunity to catch up with Dave Balter, the CEO at BzzAgent. Last spring NOLS did a GoodBzz campaign, a pro bono word of mouth marketing initiative with Dave and his crew. It was a wonderful experience. We learned a ton about how to do a better job managing our own word of mouth initiatives, got back a lot of great data, received tons of anecdotal information that allowed us to hone our message and got to meet some very cool folks. Since then Dave and BzzAgent have gotten famous. Dave a has a book out, Grapevine (NOLS is in the book!), they have received a big infusion of capital and in the past few weeks BzzAgent has been featured in Inc. magazine and on NPR.

Tuesday afternoon I met with Joe Curl and Steve Lembke at Elderhostel. Joe and I met when we teamed up on a presentation at the recent Educational Travel Conference. After shooting the breeze a bit at the conference we decided that there might be some synergies between NOLS and Elderhostel. This meeting in Boston proved that thought. Elderhostel is trying to explore some offerings that could attract some younger travelers. At NOLS we have long tried to grow our programming for those over the age of forty. We agreed that there might be some opportunities for co-branded offerings between our two organizations so we will be further exploring this.

Tuesday night I got back together with the Bus crew at Zandy’s Mom’s home were she put out a fantastic dinner for us—grilled veggies, tofu, bread and dips, desserts. Yummy! Shout out for Rena!

Yesterday the Bus crew plus Matthew and I journeyed north to Manchester, NH to meet with Stonyfield Farms CE-Yo Gary Hirshberg, Mary Townsend, Tim Kenney and the marketing team. Stonyfield Farms produces incredible organic yogurts and other dairy products. They are an industry leader in organic foods and have a very prominent educational mission focusing both on the foods that we put in our bodies and how they are produced.

Stonyfield Farms is considering sponsorship of the NOLS Bus starting in the fall. Curtis, Amy and Zandy did a fantastic job introducing staff there to NOLS and the Bus. Over lunch we discussed the missions and values of our organizations and identified a number of possible intersections. From my perspective Stonyfield Farms would be an excellent partner for the bus project and there are many other projects we should consider working together on.

After the meeting and with a few quarts of Stonyfield Farms organic ice cream under our belts we have all headed in different directions. The Bus crew is at Williams College today, Matthew is headed for the Bahamas for a well-deserved break and I’m on my way home to Lan Diego where we will be celebrating my son, Clay’s 18th birthday! Cool!

Bruce Palmer, NOLS marketing director

p.s. Stonyfield Farm’s trademark cow is named Gert!