Often I am asked for local broadband adoption stories. I thought I’d start to track some here with (hopefully) weekly articles or videos. Today, I start with Brouwer Berries in Raymond, Minnesota. I heard about them through Jean Spaulding with the Kandiyohi County & Willmar Economic Development Commission. I feel like I should add a disclaimer like ‘results may vary’. Today’s example is of someone (Sarah Brouwer) who used technology to tell her story – but she has a great story, and as you’ll see below, a great voice. I’ve pieced together parts of our e-mail conversation for you.
Brouwer Berries: You-pick and pre-picked strawberries
How have you used technology?
I’ve had a web-site for our little hobby farm for 3 years, and people can sign up for my e-mail alerts. I actually had the web-site created after attending web-site workshops in Willmar sponsored by the Blandin Foundation, and half the site was paid for by a Blandin grant. The web-site is great as a way for people to get directions or info about our farm. People prefer looking the information up to telephoning us. The e-mail alerts are great. People really appreciate hearing about the field conditions, and optimum picking times. I tend to be hesitant about sending out too many e-mails, though, because I don’t want to overwhelm people. This year, however, we started a Facebook Fan page.
How is Facebook working for you?
Unbelievable-that’s all I can say about Facebook! I detest Facebook personally, and am leery of posting anything on my own status since I don’t like the way a comment can be read by so many people, but at an MFVGA (Minnesota Fruits and Vegetable Grower’s Ass’n) convention last January every single marketing workshop I went to said “Your business has to have a Facebook page”. So, I did.
The results were incredible. I’d post that I’d be in a certain town at the side of the road at 3:00 later that day, and the first TEN of my customers would tell me they read it on Facebook. One lady even took me to the side and said “I flew in from Chicago today, and noticed on my laptop that you’d be here, so I haven’t even gone home yet but I’m stopping for your berries, and thank-you for letting me know!”
Other people told me “Sure, post pictures of us on your Page — anything to help your business”.
The crazy part was all the people thanking me. I kid you not– they were thanking me for what I considered advertisement! They had signed up to be notified, and they were happy to have my posts! These are people of all ages — in fact, every week Facebook sends me an “insights” page that breaks down my fans by age and gender. It is so simple, and I haven’t bothered posting anything since the end of the strawberry harvest, but you can bet that next spring I’ll start raving about the coming crop in order to gain more “likes” to my site.
How has having broadband helped?
I access the internet at home on a traditional (but new) computer — I’m a home schooling mom. We got broadband less than a year ago, which really facilitated the Facebook and website management. Before we had it, I didn’t change my strawberry website home page more than once or twice a strawberry season, and I only checked my personal Facebook page once a month because it took so long for pictures to download.
This past strawberry season, with broadband, I was able to update my strawberry website and Facebook nearly daily without a huge time commitment. This was extremely helpful, because it was a very wet spring, which adversely affected our crop. Many people were checking our website and Facebook status to see how wet the field was, and if there were berries available to pick when they had time to come. With all the standing water in our fields, I’m certain that an even larger portion of our crop would have spoiled without the use of technology to draw pickers and purchasers to our field in between rainstorms.
If you have or know if a broadband story of success to share, please send it my way. I will also archive the stories on the Blandin Applications in Action site.