Potential Meeting Location

I have been researching meeting locations in the Atlanta, Tucker and Northlake areas.  The strange thing is it's either restaurants, churches or libraries.  I don't like the idea of meeting at a restaurant.  It promotes poor eating choices and puts people in conflict.  If you don't eat healthy, you feel bad and if you watch others eat poorly, it's harder to stick to your healthy eating plan. So I have been brainstorming on places where we can go and learn.  Somewhere that offers healthy choices and maybe opportunities to incorporate a new way of eating, shopping or cooking. I came up with Whole Foods Market.  They educate their customers about natural and organic foods, health, nutrition and the environment.  I believe this makes for a wonderful partnership with a group of people who are trying to learn to eat healthier, organically (where possible), more fresh fruits and vegetables and incorporate whole grains into their diets. Let me know if you have suggestions or comments on this approach.   Mick

Great thinking there Mick!
I'm Eric, the founder of OH.
I called the number here and didn't have any luck getting through to any store manager:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/calendars/BCF.html

I was noticing this:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/communitygiving.html

I wound up here:
http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/facts.html
I called this number: 512.477.4455
Option #5 goes to marketing. That brings up this submenu:
  media relations - 1
  advertising / promotion / sponsorship - 2
  community giving - 4
  office of VP - 6
I hung up at that point.

Mick - would you be interested in doing any leg work / research for me and my PR team?  I would appreciate it if you might be able to come up with names and numbers of different people within Whole Foods who would be interetested in working with OH at a national level. That would facilitate me or one of my staff speaking directly with them.

We could promote them to our membership if, in turn, they would do things to make it easy for all our support groups to have meetings at their venues. This could be very good PR for them. It could be a form of "community giving".  With OH.com as a media outlet (web, and magazine) we could be a good media relationship for them.

Having said that, I've never heard of Whole Foods before and I have no idea what type of venue they have (how large a group size could they support, for example?), nor any idea of what they could do to help us. Moreover, I have no idea how relevant corporate headquarters is to ongoings at the level of the local store.  One of the URLs above does direct traffic to the "marketing director" of local stores, validating an expected two-layers there. The web site also lists regional VPs.

If you're interested in helping with the above, please email [email protected] , our VP of Communications.

Thanks!

-EAK'08

Eric- I contacted Whole Foods and tried to reach a live body (corporate office).  They have various tiers of voice messages that ended in the message "Whole Foods is a decentralized company so most information is handled on a regional or local level."  That said, I have not been given a date or venue at my local store to actually discuss how this works, what success we're having or use my idea as a best practice at this time. I would think if we can actually have a few meetings and write up what we're doing, what's working and the win/win statements to utilize when engaging Whole Foods on a regional or corporate level, that might be more effective. Also, if I hear any names for people at a higher level, I'd be happy to pass them along.  Otherwise, I don't think there's going to be a way to engage them as they have many companies trying on the corporate level and have filters in place for this.   I believe sharing best practices with OH Leaders through the leadership program is a great strategy and may be more effective as a grass roots program than engaging them at a corporate level where they may not see a ROI or value proposition at this time.  Again, once I have meetings going and can share what benefits we are seeing and get the local store management to do the same in terms of incremental revenue, community awareness and involvement or other benefits they are realizing, this may be a great concept to roll out nationally.   I'll keep updating my blog/journal we make more headway.  The last several attempts at engaging the resource I was working with at Whole Foods have not resulted in getting dates, times, etc. for my meetings.   Thanks for checking out my OH group! Mick