If you had a message you wanted to get to a lot of people, how would you do it?
OK, how would you do it if the year was 1985 and the Internet (as we know it) didn’t exist.
Neither did satellite TV, streaming TV, satellite radio, or podcasts.
Televison, Telephone and Tell a ….
Cell phones came out that year, but not many people had one. The Macintosh was the hottest computer, having been introduced the year before, but you couldn’t use it to directly spread your
message.
Of course there was television—both network and cable—and, according to research, Americans watched 39 minutes of news per day. You could advertise there.
But if your message wasn’t intended to sell anything or bring you money in return for your investment, any of those things (Super Bowl ad?) would have been too costly.
One Man Makes a Difference in the Long Haul
One man had a message to share, though, and he had a way to do it that wouldn’t cost a lot but
might reach a lot of people. He could put his message on the back of trucks that were transporting
goods throughout the United States.
His company was based in a tiny town in central Illinois called Farmer City, which had a
population of around 2,000 folks, but his trucks were all over the country.
So he turned the back of his trucks (where he could have pushed his own company name) into moving billboards and sent them out to see if anyone would notice.
“Start the week off right,” it said. “Attend the church of your choice.”
1,000s of Letters in Response to No One in Particular
Whether or not people attended church is unknown, but the owner told me he got thousands of
letters thanking him for that message. People said it lifted their mood, made them smile, and
caused them to slow down a little and think a little more. He even received a note saying that
message had saved someone’s life.
All because he decided to do something good with that space instead of doing something that
was simply commercial.
Share a message of doing good however and wherever you can, and just in that you’ll be doing
more good than you can even imagine.
Thanks, Roger, for inspiring us all to do good.
