Free Money

How I Gave Away Free Money

Where did I you go?

Right off the bat, I have to admit that this was the most daunting exercise of all.  My first inclination was to go to the beach but then I found about the Ybor City Chocolate Festival in Tampa where food trucks were selling all types of chocolate goodies.  I decided to take my family to this event and conduct the free money exercise so kill two birds with one stone.

What kind of people did I plan to approach?

At first, I was thinking of approaching young people who I thought would be more accepting of someone just walking up to them.  This is why I thought of going to the beach where young people can be found without a problem.

What did I plan to say to get the conversation started?

I just planned to say hello and offer to shake the person's hand to get started.

What was my plan for the conversation?

My plan is to give them a dollar asking them to pay it forward by hopefully adding a dollar of their own.  Once they accept, I hope to give them a little card about SORIN, the Socially Responsible Initiative that I am working with the hope that they will check us out on Facebook and Twitter.

Out of five attempts, how many dollar bills did I think I could give away.

I expect to give out 5 dollar bills.

What really happened?

I went to the Ybor City Chocolate Festival with my family and found a considerable amount of people there with many people lining up in front of food trucks for their chocolate goody of choice.  My initial plan of approaching one person at a time was thrown off a bit because pretty much everyone was there with someone so I decided to approach couples instead.  In all, I approached 3 couples and gave out 6 dollar bills.

The hardest part was approaching people but once I did, it became easy to introduce myself and just start talking.  The first two couples responded in a friendly and even excited manner.  Once they heard that I was handing out money for them to pay it forward, they gladly accepted it and were quite appreciative.  This gave me the opportunity to briefly tell them about SORIN and hand them an information card.  Please note that my camera person, who will go nameless, missed the first couple of seconds when I was handing out the dollar bills so sorry for that.

Video 1

Video 2

The third and final encounter was the most interesting because the first couple I approached seemed perplexed.  The man did not want to accept the dollar bill while the woman quickly turned around and give it to another man standing close by so I turned and focused my attention this other couple and ended up giving them the dollar.  This third video is also more complete and shows the transition that occurred.

Video 3

Overall, I was right in that I did give away 5 dollar bills, in fact 6 and I was pleasantly surprised that most people were receptive.  It was most certainly from the good vibes of the chocolate festival.  I learned that this type of strategy can work well for promoting SORIN.