“We Ride for Every Child!”

Our crew at the 2014 Children’s National 5k fundraiser run in Washington, DC

Marketing Scooters in the DC Region

Successful advertising and promotions can look drastically different depending on a business’s location, industry, and product/service offerings. What works for one business doesn’t always work for another, even within the same industry. At College Scooters, a DC-area scooter shop I co-founded in 2010, we had our own set of advertising challenges, that led us to get creative and try promotional channels outside of conventional strategies.

First, let’s address the market we operated in and the product mix we sold. Our store was located six miles from the DC line in College Park, MD. The DC is metro is known for being one of the most expensive in the country, so traditional advertising mediums like TV, radio, billboards, etc. were completely out of the question for us. We tried advertising in some College Park specific publications directed at students, using things like discount coupons, but response on these was usually lackluster and too little to late to attract the customer before they started their semester.

As our name implies, we started the business to sell motor scooters to college students (think Vespa). Over the first four years, we realized there was untapped potential on also focusing on the DC urban professional living and working in the city, who needed a reliable, quick, and easy way to get from their home to work, and run various small areas in their neighborhood. As our business grew with the students, so did it with urban professionals. The two customer segments quickly became our main focus, averaging to 50% students and 50% urban professionals. While our name was still quite specific in our assumed target market, it still made logical sense to DC commuters since we were located in “College Park” after all. People quickly realized that scooters could be used for much more than just getting around a college campus, and transcended typical rider demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Much of our business came from the fact that we simply “existed”. As in, there were only so many scooter shops in the DC-area at the time, and we were close enough to the city, with the right products, pricing, and professionalism to win with most customers searching for a scooter. However, even in a less saturated market, you still want to push forward with sustainable growth. Our greatest need with the urban professionals was usually to just let them know that we exist, and that our scooters might be the perfect solution to their commuting needs (more reliable than the metro, faster than walking or biking, and cheaper than Uber).

Children’s National

The best path we devised for advertising to reach DC professionals was through events in and around the city. However, as simple as that sounds, many events were way out of our budget, and we couldn’t justify the cost when analyzing the potential ROI. Other events or farmer-market type gatherings can even be fairly exclusive, and limit access to retail businesses that aren’t selling food or small crafts. We were either too commercial, or too small to afford event opportunities with say, someone like the Washington Nationals MLB team (which we considered numerous times). Enter Children’s National hospital and their fundraising team.

Over the decade of owning College Scooters, we were constantly solicited with marketing cold calls. Usually we could establish clear objections to their offerings pretty quickly, and would find a misalignment between what they offered and what we needed. However after one of these conversations and subsequent emails with Children’s National Hospital, we found a way we could help them and spread awareness of our scooters along the way, by participating in their gala fundraiser program.

Children’s National’s needs were clear: raise money for patient care, and provide an engaging experience for gala attendees so they (a) desire to attend the gala event, and (b) so the attendees purchase auction items at the event that are relevant to their lives or desired by them, all while donating their money and time to a great organization.

A poster at the Children’s National 5k run as it gets hand prints from many attendees.

We quickly realized that offering a scooter at the gala’s auction would be a fantastic way to get our scooters in front of an engaged and professional DC audience, and fulfill our mission to “build a community” with our business (which was one of our Core Values). Children’s National does as big lead-up to the gala itself and promotes it throughout the year, culminating in a winter after promoting the event and its auction items all year. Deciding to participate and offer a scooter was the easy part — the fun really began when we had to figure out how to market the scooter for the event, and increase our engagement and presence with Children’s National’s promotions throughout the year.

If you’ve been to DC, you know that a LOT of people run in the city. It seems like no matter what time of day, year, or the weather, you’ll see people running in almost every corner of the district. Children’s National was aware of this, and hosted a 5K run/walk every fall, which was used for fundraising, promotion of the gala, and general community engagement. Knowing how popular running is in DC, we knew early on that we wanted to attend the event, but we wanted to do more than just show up with a scooter, which in our minds would come off to “sales-y” working with a company that is all about helping people and their families.

As Children’s National’s name implies, the hospital provides critical care to children. While we never sold scooters for kids, we wanted to engage the whole family at our booth during, and provide something fun for the kids to do during the full-time 5k event.

The Big Idea

With our participation in the Children’s Nation’s annual 5k on the calendar, we wanted to find a way to engage people on the day of the event with one of our scooters. When thinking of other great events, especially ones where the whole family attends, we realized that some kind of simple activity for kids or families together can yield excellent engagement, and take the focus away from trying to “sell” something. Enter the “scooter with handprints” idea.

When drawing inspiration for our participation in the event, we kept coming back to two ideas we’d seen at other events. The first one was with Geico Insurance, who always seemed to have some kind of game or competition that attendees could play and win a prize. These games usually had nothing to do with insurance, but were fun and engaging for the players, and gave Geico the opportunity to interact with customers at the “ground level” and build rapport with the customer as a fun and friendly brand.

Setting up for the “big day” the scooter is still untouched, but not for long…

The other inspiration was from, as corny as it might sound, carnivals and festivals, which have many things for kids to participate in, such as face painting and games. We knew we didn’t want to provide a competition or game to play as this could take too much time, and we didn’t want to just offer a photo opportunity with the Children’s National mascot and our scooter.

Through this brainstorming and combining the two types of event inspirations, we thought: why not let people decorate or paint the scooter somehow, and then it can become a unique, one-of-a-kind auction item at the gala later in the year? Drawing inspiration from the festivals and event participation of other bigger companies, we came up with letting the kids in attendance place their handprint on the scooter with colorful paint, as both a symbol of how the scooter’s purpose was for raising funds for Children’s National, and as a way to honor and celebrate the patients of the hospital in a lasting way.

The Scooter

With the idea decided, it was then a matter of which scooter to select for the event. The color was a pretty obvious choice: white would allow the painted hand prints to be the most visible. Then we just needed to pick a scooter brand and model from our line-up. We looked at our sales data and found the most popular scooter purchased by DC customers was the Genuine Scooter Company “Buddy” model. It has those classic/retro lines that come to mind when thinking of a scooter, mixed with modern reliability and a great warranty. The Buddy was also one of the best scooters in our line-up overall with the lowest operational cost, and we wanted to represent both College Scooters and Children’s National well.

However, Genuine Buddy scooters were not the cheapest in our line-up by any means, with an MSRP at the time around $2000 (now closer to $3000). For reference, we had a scooter in our line-up as cheap as $1299 back then. To participate the event, we had to pay for a booth fee and pay our staff to be there, so why not try to be the only ones shouldering the cost of the scooter? With a few quick emails and phone calls to the team and Genuine Scooter Company, we reached an agreement that one of the scooters on our next order would be at a “demo” price, considerably reducing the cost of the scooter for the event, and essentially sharing the cost with Genuine. This outcome illustrates the importance of strong relationships with your suppliers. When you go to make that phone call, your rep will remember how you treated them all the other times they needed something from you, or you needed something from them.

We had the event idea, we had the scooter, now it was time to put all of this planning to work!

The 5K

The 5K morning finally came, and we arrived early in the morning to DC, brimming with excitement and anticipation of a fun day. Navid and I hurried to setup our tent, unload the scooter, and get everything as ready as possible before everyone showed up. The DC metro motorcycle team was there blocking off the streets, and I will say it was pretty cool to be able to drive past a police barricade in your nation’s capital, down a closed-off street right near the national mall and all the different agency buildings.

The starting line at the 2014 Children’s National “Race for Every Child”

With any event that you’re leading, there’s always nerves mixed in with the excitement. You’re hoping people attend, participate/engage with your booth, have a good time, and of course that the weather cooperates (this is the unpredictable Mid Atlantic after all, where a fall day can either be 50 and sunny, or literally hurricane weather). Luckily, we had a great team participating with us! Not only did we have some of our staff there helping us, but we had a whole crew volunteer as a part of the event’s desire for people to sign up and attend the event as groups. As you might see with a March of Dimes charity walk, the Children’s National event was filled with large groups all wearing their matching tee shirts, helping to raise money for the hospital, support a patient they might know, and just generally have a great time at a community-driven, positive event in DC. With our team’s blaze-orange red shirts (our College Scooters brand colors were orange and blue at the time), you could spot one of our team members from a mile a way, and certainly drew the eye to our booth, along with the cool scooter we had sitting out front. The curiosity grew, and other folks made their way to our space one-by-one to see what we’re up to.

Not too long into the event, our plain white scooter finally came to life with the colorful, painted hand prints of the children attending the event with their family. It was so fun to see their faces LIGHT UP when they realized they could literally put their hand on a scooter with PAINT, something kids definitely do not get to do every day. The parents equally loved seeing the joy on their kids’ faces and with camera in hand, we captured some great moments for families making lasting memories.

After a few hours, our scooter had transformed into a work of art - a true one-off piece that could never be replicated in the same way ever again. We were both honored and excited to participate ourselves, but also to see how much attendees loved hand-painting activity and actually spent time talking to us about what we do and what we sell. The icing on the cake was actually selling two scooters to a guy that day. It was never our intention to make an actual sale that day, but as a small business if someone wants to exchange dollars for your offering, you need to work hard to say yes to that opportunity as much as possible, even if that means it’s outside of your normal routine/circumstance. With a two-scooter sale secured, my business partner Navid ran back to our store to begin prepping the scooters and get them delivered, while I stayed with the event team and helped pack up and drive our equipment back to storage.

Summary

A few months later, we delivered the scooter to the Children’s National gala location at a swanky hotel in DC, and wished them the best for a successful auction. After the weekend, we got the great news - the scooter had received a donation for thousands of dollars more than its cash value - which is always a win for a fundraising team! Not only that, but the scooter auction winner allowed the scooter to be displayed for months at our store to further raise awareness for the Children’s National mission. We displayed the scooter proudly and prominently in our showroom, and nearly everyone that came in asked about it.

I still think about this event all the time. It felt like everything went right, and was the perfection combination of creativity, community outreach, branding, advertising, and just fun in general. We were able to get together with some of our friends, step outside of the retail business confines for a day in DC on a beautiful fall Saturday, and help a really good nonprofit/cause along the way. I still often reference this event as inspiration for events we’ve since attended with both College Scooters and Shore Cycles, and always try to remember to make it about the attendee, not about yourself. You’re not there to sell something. While that can and should be a desired outcome, you are really there to make sure the attendees enjoy themselves, and that you contribute positively to the events ethos and atmosphere. I’m proud to be a participant and leader of this campaign, and hope for ways to contribute meaningfully in the future through other events in more places.

From left to right: John Churchman (me), Cecilia, Kashni, Emily, Meera (Navid’s wife), and Navid (my business partner)

A picture of our College Scooters showroom circa 2015 with the Children’s National scooter displayed prominently on a lift for everyone to see and admire.