Lessons Learned
This pilot program allowed us to explore the possibilities of new collaborations and creating new programming. While we were generally satisfied with the outcomes and received positive feedback from many participants and others in the community, there are things we'd like to improve on and considering doing differently.
OUTREACH AND MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
We set a goal of engaging participants throughout the county and satisfied this to some extent. By hosting two bike rides in very different areas (about 40 miles apart) we hoped to reach a wide range of people. We promoted the event through our immediate social media networks and through our respective organizations (LACBC and MCM) and were supported by many other organizations and affiliates to help recruit participants for the bike rides initially. The turnout in the Pomona Valley bike ride was significantly less than the one that took place in downtown Los Angeles, but this was expected due to the existing amount of people cycling in those areas and the locations.
For the summit, we limited our outreach efforts in some ways because of the limited amount of seats we could offer. We didn't want to disappoint people by putting them on the waiting list, which we did to several people.
Another goal was to reach people less engaged in cycling or organized groups to diversify the voices and experiences in these spaces, but we discovered that many of our participants were already affiliated with cycling organizations, advocacy, and academic institutions.
As Melissa Balmer of Pedal Love reminds us, California has one of the top media markets in the country. We could use this to our advantage and reach out to more media sources to promote events, but most importantly our initiatives and narratives related to cycling. We should engage local magazines, newspapers, blogs, and social media influencers, not just those who cover cycling, but expand to lifestyle, entertainment, and other sections beyond transportation and political news.
BUDGET AND PERSONNEL
When the grant was written, we underestimated the costs of this program and did not allocate as we should have in regards to personnel costs. We could have budgeted more for a graphic designer and perhaps treated ourselves as consultants to compensate for our own time. It seems to be the expectation that even people who work behind grants like these should work for free and be powered by passion alone. For the health of the program and the people dedicating their time to this work, it would be a positive trend to promote the value of personnel and build in stipends and hourly compensation.
EVALUATION
Collecting surveys at the end of bike rides and the summit was a challenge. The idea was to gather feedback before and after, however, we were only able to successfully collect surveys at the end of the summit. We received 14 completed surveys, less than half of the attendees. In the future we would designate someone to be in charge of evaluation tasks such as distributing and collecting these surveys.
DOCUMENTATION
Photography and live tweeting are excellent ways to document the event. We collected lots of moments with the help of a photographer and participants' own snaps, but we would have liked to do some video to pull everything together.