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Last week marked the first-ever Carrotmob event in Kansas City! (And second-ever in the U.S.!) It was an honor to help organize this event with some of the most lovely, conscientious people in town.

For those of you not already familiar, Carrotmob is an absolutely ingenious concept of win-win consumer activism — we buy stuff we’d buy anyway, and with a relatively small amount of prep-work and organizing, we’re able to turn our purchases into a bargaining tool that end up helping a business benefit from energy efficiency improvements. I got involved because I believe in the positive impact we can make with our consumer-driven decisions… just takes a bit of well-thought-out strategy. I first read about it this spring on Worldchanging.com.

For our event, we approached 15 KC businesses with the proposal: “We’ll bring a mob of paying customers, if you commit the highest percentage of revenue to going green.” World of Spirits (1722 W. 39th St.) won the bidding war with a high bid of 24%! On Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008, 24% of the gross revenue collected between the hours of 5 and 10 p.m. were used to make the store more energy efficient.

Our awesome results:

325 – the minimum number of people that showed up.
$1500 – the average sales during the timeframe at the store on a normal day.
$7015 – the amount our mob spent!
$1683.60 – 24% that goes toward energy efficiency improvement to the store.
200 pounds – roughly the amount of food that was donated to Harvesters.
600 pounds – roughly the amount of food that Ed Sachs, the store owner, donated to Harvesters.

My bragging:

The first event was in SF. It was wildly successful… and I think ours may have actually topped theirs. Their store’s percentage bid was 22% — 2% lower than ours. Their mob doubled their store’s average sales — ours almost quintupled. And they attracted 400 people — which, per capita, we had to have topped with 325! Makes me proud so of KC!

We will definitely be organizing future events, with the next slated potentially for March/April 2009. Until then, join the Carrotmob KC Facebook group to keep up on things.

And I thank you.