Spontaneous Walking Tour

0: The number of people who showed up to our Benefit Bank presentation in Preble County.

You read that correctly.

Kaitlyn and I have been giving presentations to our counties in the southwest region of Ohio. We sent out letters to other nonprofit sites that we hoped would want to become a Benefit Bank site, giving them a brief overview of the program. So far we haven't had much luck. So for Preble County, for which we only sent out 20 lettes, we followed up the letters with a phone call, reminding them of the presentation. We drove 45 minutes out there, got all set up, and waited 20 minutes before we decided no one was going to show up.

But we didn't drive all the way out there for nothing, so Kaitlyn looked up some of the sites we had invited, wrote down the addresses, and got back in the car. We figured if they weren't going to come to us, then we were going to go to them!

We weren't sure how people were going to react to us, so we were a little anxious at first. We didn't want people to think we were trying to sell them something, or carrying around the book of Mormon. But people were very receptive to us, all very polite, and our spontaneous drive around Preble County turned out to be pretty successful. No one had heard of the Benefit Bank before, and we got to sit down and talk with people at two organizations about it. They were really ecstatic about the program, which made us want to skip around the parking lot. (But we didn't).

We also learned that a lot of the information we have in our spreadsheets is no longer accurate. A few of the buildings we drove by looked completely vacant, so we may have to do some research to figure out where these agencies disappeared to.

We did a lot of walking, because a lot of the nonprofits were on the same street as one another. It was a pretty fun way to spend the day!