As usual, here's the last note I drew and snuck into my daughter's school lunch (yesterday's lunch).Unlike my previous posts, I won't go into the lunches I packed for the girls this week...in fact...I haven't touched my blog in a few days because something very interesting has happened.
Our free classroom poster for Language Arts high school teachers went viral. And when I say viral...I mean...VIRAL.
We launched our free education resources on StageofLife.com last month as teachers and students were returning to school.
This expanded education section includes free lesson plans, mentor texts of our winning essays, writing prompts, goal setting worksheets, trends on teens, thoughts about digital literacy, and our new 12"x18" free classroom poster for high school and college English teachers/professors which touts our National Student Writing Contest.
Since making the poster available, we've been getting a handful of poster requests in each week, mostly from our loyal teacher followers already using Stage of Life or a few who have heard about us via our Facebook Fan page, but then it happened...
- On Thursday...82 poster requests rolled in.
- On Friday...55 poster requests rolled in.
- Today...I've already received 12.
It turns out a handful of websites came across our free classroom poster and posted it on their forum boards. And then others followed. And now we've got websites in India talking about our free high school classroom poster (sorry, no international shipping at this time, folks!).
My Marketing Coordinator, Megan, looked at me when she left the office on Friday and said,
"Eric, if this keeps up, we'll need an intern...just to keep up with shipping out the posters to high schools."
I immediately started investigating finding a local high school student who might want to intern with us and learn their way around mail merge. :)
Part of me is thrilled about this activity and exposure and new traffic to our global writing initiative at StageofLife.com. It's positive exposure for our free education resources and our mission to get students writing more outside of the classroom by using blogging. In fact, many of the new visitors contacting us to request the poster have had some really great things to say about the content, blogs and concept for StageofLife.com.
For all of that...I'm beyond excited.
But another part of me is terrified.
Is our small grassroots initiative prepared for viral growth that we can't control? Yes, I have a shipping budget, but as a self-funded, privately owned start-up, we don't have unlimited funds to produce, print and mail our four-color, awesome writing contest posters. I've actually started thinking about reaching out to a few organizations and brands that might want to help sponsor our poster outreach effort and/or some of the free educational benefits we offer on the site.
I need to get to that...asap.
So least to say, it was an exciting week. Add that excitement on top of our normal work, servicing our B2B partnership marketing clients, managing our member benefit and perk program accounts, etc. and I was definitely ready for the weekend.
Speaking of which...
Today, my wife and two daughters took a quick drive over to Miller's Plant Farm in York, PA. They kicked off their fall festival and we pigged out on free samples of pumpkin bread, pumpkin pudding, apple cider, gingerbread, and pumpkin pie. We also took a rainy hay ride through the farm and of course ended up buying a lot of fall goodies.
Till tomorrow...
--Eric
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