Was the Conservation Lottery a Marketing Failure?

For decades around here, there has been a pattern of city people purchasing a rural acreage, building a house, planting a few trees and mowing a lawn of many acres. There would seem to be a great opportunity here to also interest them in creating areas of quality habitat, like windbreaks, hedgerows, raingardens, butterfly gardens, prairie plantings, etc. But how does one go about creating this interest and offering incentives?

Sample illustration provided

My idea in 2004 was for the Johnson County Heritage Trust to create the Conservation Lottery. A once-a-year event in which someone would win a complete landscape makeover. Applicants would draw up a plan of what their rural property could become, and guidelines and sample illustrations were provided.

A committee would check to make sure the plan was realistic and desirable – no invasives, etc., and enter it into the lottery pool. Then at Prairie Preview in early March, there would be a drawing for the winner. In addition to a thousand dollars cash to purchase plants and supplies; on a select early spring day there would be a serious turnout of JCHT membership with tools and more plants and do much of the makeover.

The lottery was advertised in local media and included a direct mailing to some folks who had recently built homes on rural property. We figured that the actual makeover would be newsworthy, and stories and photos from one year would help fuel the following year and turn it into an annual event. Folks who didn’t win on their first try could reapply with the same package next year, and at a minimum they would have a plan they could carry out on their own.

Oxford elementary school teachers receive their lottery check in 2006 for a prairie planting surrounded by wildlife shrubs, all planted by the children.

The lottery ran in 2005 and again in 2006 and the interest shown in it was underwhelming. Schools could apply and won in both years, in part because there were so few other applicants in the pool.

The Heritage Trust committee who serviced this project felt that it was a lot of effort for small returns, in that it didn’t seem to be generating much interest amongst the many people with rural acreages. So the project was dropped.

So was this just a marketing failure on our part? Did our prospective audience think that if it was free then it couldn’t be worth much (you get what you pay for)? Would it seem to be worth more if offered by a professional landscaping company as a promotional, and subsidized by Bur Oak Land Trust?

Is it just too much bother for homeowners when there is so much to watch on TV and the internet? Would it be more marketable if there were landscape makeover programs on TV, comparable to the home makeovers, where it all gets done in less than an hour between commercials, and the owner goes into raptures over the remodeled kitchen?

Perhaps folks are not prepared to work their way through a conservation landscaping plan, so the detailed planning should have been included in the lottery package? Is there opportunity to revive the concept and turn it over to someone tuned into modern marketing?

Our place, 1994, by Sun Photo