guest post #2 : lessons learned.

more from our friend, vikki otero...

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If you read my post last week, you know all about me and what I’m trying to do. But there’s more to this assignment… Part of this project involves me offering advice to others who might choose to do this kind of outreach.

My first and most important suggestion is this: be more aggressive. I should have followed up more quickly and more frequently rather than once or twice with weeks between contacts. I need to make sure they know who I am, and I won’t let them ignore me. It’s necessary to be polite, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with making a phone call every single day.

I am also preparing a small information card for Mercy For Animals with lists of vegan protein sources, vegan substitutions, and other quick tips on how a restaurant can quickly become vegan-friendly and why it might choose to do so. I figure that leaving this at restaurants along with my contact information might pique an owner’s interest a little bit more than a cryptic phone call or e-mail from some unknown yahoo did.

this way, restaurants will KNOW how to go from this:

plain potatoes & sub-par guac.

and this:

dry toast.

to THIS:

a delicious tofu scramble. 

Since the holidays have now passed… What started as a school project is now no longer for credit, but just a labor of love. I intend to implement the above two suggestions in phase two, and undoubtedly I will learn some more about how to make this work more effectively. I really believe there is something to this; it’s so easy and so awesome to be vegan-friendly that it has to just be a matter of finding the best way to communicate it to restaurateurs. I’ll keep working on it.

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coming next week … three different restaurants, three different reasons for becoming vegan-friendly. see you then!