Conscious CT is entering its second year of networking our regional community. It has all been a grand experiment and we’ve learned a lot. In the first year we laid the foundation for the website playing with photo albums, blogs and calendars. So far, so good and we hope you are finding the site helpful in your own journey. Now where do we go from here?
Strengthen the community, reach out to more people, and encourage education.
The advantages of using a website are that they are flexible, easy to update and very low cost to publish. We kept down the expenses so were able to create and maintain the site with volunteers and relatively little out of pocket expense.
Our goals for our second year are a little more ambitious:
1- We want this to become a community effort, with area businesses that benefit from the site also getting involved with planning and development.
2- At this point we have about 550 who receive our monthly emails and about 3,000 unique hits on our website per month. Not bad for doing no advertising; but our readers are primarily the existing holistic community and our intent was always to use the website to reach the larger public - the audience that put "The Secret" on the best seller list and watches Eckhart Tolle on Oprah. A large segment of the population doesn't know our community exists and what we can offer them, yet has a strong interest in spirituality, holistic health and the environment.
3- Education is the key to personal growth and healing. Much of the website supports that goal, but there is room for improvement in organization and what is offered. It’s not something we can do alone, but perhaps we can be a catalyst for improvement.
Meeting all three goals will require community involvement. To reach a larger audience we have to advertise, and to advertise we have to raise funds. To do this we are inviting 12 businesses to become Sponsors. But we don't just want to sell advertising; we are asking our 12 Sponsors to partner with us in defining how the website and the community evolves. It's a different way to run a business, but then it is all a grand experiment.
In our September newsletter we introduce several new features on the website that begin to support these goals. And we introduce our first Sponsor, Breathe..more of Tolland. We are very grateful to Cherie Trice for being the first business to support us. With the support of the community we’re very optimistic about what we can accomplish together.
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