Marketing and Visibility

Planning ahead is a key factor to increasing the size and scope of your program. Many community outreach events have strict application deadlines. Keeping track of dates and deadlines is critical, as such events are great opportunities to spread the word and increase your organization's visibiltiy.
Network with diverse organizations in your area. In Seattle, City Fruit's home, there are many food-related organizations and events like National Public Lands Day and Food Day at local universities that are great for marketing your organization. Using social media hashtags and memes is also a complementary activity for making your organization more visible. In 2015 City Fruit developed a partnership with UW undergraduate students and community members looking to increase their volunteering and engagement with local food for the 2016 harvest year.
In 2015 City Fruit worked to push out regular press releases to local blogs in neighborhoods where community engagement and volunteer recruitment was low. This included Mt. Baker and West Seattle for City Fruit’s Save Seattle’s Apples campaign in spring.
When out at community events, wear your organization’s t-shirts to help increase brand recognition. Print out a list of upcoming events for volunteers or community members to sign-up for as well as a general newsletter sign-up sheet.
Be sure to engage people on whichever social media outlets you use, whether Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, responding to their comments where applicable or tagging partners in any posts. This also increases visibility.
Some key pieces of marketing materials for City Fruit includes a door hanger to inform donors that we have visited and harvested from their properties, including pounds harvested and a donation site where applicable.
In addition, we have small handouts for people to give to neighbors or friends who have fruit trees. It informs people of City Fruit’s work and gives them instructions to reach out to City Fruit, register their tree, and donate fruit to the annual harvest. These are particularly popular at outreach events - it is a small way for people to spread the word about the work.

City Fruit Seattle

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City Fruit promotes the cultivation of urban fruit in order to nourish people, build community and protect the climate. We help tree owners grow healthy fruit, provide assistance in harvesting and preserving fruit, promote the sharing of extra fruit, and work to protect urban fruit trees.

Our programs include harvesting unwanted fruit from private properties, stewarding and harvesting public orchards, training orchard stewards, and delivering the thousands of pounds of gleaned fruit to organizations who can distribute it to people who need it most: food banks, senior centers, homeless shelters, low-income housing programs, lunch programs, daycares and more.

In late 2013, City Fruit was chosen to take part in Harvest Against Hunger's (formerly Rotary First Harvest) Harvest VISTA program.This VISTA position deviated from the traditional Harvest VISTA as instead of working directly with farms or meal program recipients, the VISTA served as a Community Outreach Coordinator. Their achievements included building new relationships within the community to care for public orchards, speaking with people about City Fruit’s mission at community festivals and events, and building the volunteer base through various programs such as the Ambassador Program.

The VISTA also contributed to blogs, social media outlets, and volunteer newsletters, as well as used Salesforce and the Volunteers for Salesforce plugin to create volunteer opportunities, record hours and keep in contact with all volunteers.