I’m Treasurer for Weymouth and Portland Transition Towns and Saturday was our annual Autumn Fair. And although last year’s was mainly about money, this year we were much keener on getting people in and spreading the message, for example by inviting attractions like these Morris Dancers.
We’d also spent a lot more money and effort on advertising and on getting articles in the press and on the radio. Yet when we asked people there why they had come the answer was overwhelmingly ‘word of mouth.’ While I’m not sure quite how we go about getting more ‘word of mouth’, I was curiously rather pleased by this. There’s a kind of assumption that the way to do things is through slick media manipulation, and yet it seems people come to real live events for the sort of reasons they always did – because they know someone there, to meet their friends, to be part of a community. It has a reality that a disconnected trip to the cinema or a shopping expedition lacks; we’ve just got to make it grow.
