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Shop local campaigns are a great push for your local economy but so often they get relegated to one day a year. Creating challenges throughout the year can breathe life into your shop local efforts. Here are some suggestions:

Suggestions for Shop Local Challenges

Whichever challenge you choose, you need three things:

• A limited time frame to induce behavior.
• Specific instructions on how to participate. Adding parameters drives desired behavior and excitement around the challenge.
• An incentive to participate. Most people want a reason to do something. This can be rewarding everyone who does as you’ve asked, making them eligible for a drawing if they met the challenge, or create a leader award for someone who did it the most.

Specific Shop Local Industries

Instead of challenging people to visit all of your local businesses during a shop local week, you can pull out a specific industry and highlight them. Local farms and foods is a fun challenge, as is drink local. Create a challenge around an industry and ask people to share their experiences for further engagement. This stretches out your shop local campaign to multiple weeks instead of just one.

Involve the Big Companies

Don’t leave your box stores and large companies out in the cold. Many companies, like Target, give quite a bit back to the community. Create a challenge enticing them to buy local for their administrative needs, employee gift cards, or other products. For added excitement, have them compete against each other.

Get the Schools Involved

Create an educational program for kids on why buying local is important then challenge them to get their parents to buy local and submit their receipts. The winning class gets a pizza party.

Create a Chef’s Challenge

Line up chefs from local restaurants to create a locally-sourced meal. Vote on the best and give them bragging rights by circulating news of the win. Make this part of a larger local restaurant week where you incentivize people to dine locally.

Institute a 30-day Local Challenge

Pair up with local healthy living businesses such as gyms and nutritionists and create a challenge for people to eat local for 30-days as part of a nutritional program highlighting knowing where your food’s from. Eating clean is extremely popular right now so go ahead and jump on that bandwagon.

There are countless ideas for challenges that will boost your shop local campaign and convert it from one day a year to a full-time chamber mission.

Have you run any shop local challenges? We’d love to hear about them. Tell us about them below.