RFI Student Serviceshi 2016 | Friend, Neb.

Michael Siefert & Paul O'Dell Author

12/06/2016 Added

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[00:00:00.708](light music)
[00:00:09.468]So, hello, I'm Michael and, as Kurt mentioned,
[00:00:14.652]I was working with Paul out in Friend, Nebraska.
[00:00:18.444]That's me on the left and that's Paul on the right.
[00:00:21.110]It's just a wonderful community, very friendly and
[00:00:24.986]pun intended.
[00:00:26.277]The first project that Paul and I started working on
[00:00:28.254]was Speculative Housing.
[00:00:29.655]So when we first found out about this project,
[00:00:34.312]we heard that Friend really wanted to develop
[00:00:37.545]some kind of Speculative Housing so that way,
[00:00:44.128]people from outside the community could move in,
[00:00:46.659]keep money within the radius
[00:00:48.821]of economic development for Friend
[00:00:51.348]and increase the population,
[00:00:53.924]basically, whatever they want to do with it.
[00:00:55.332]Last I heard, the bid on this house was just under $175,000.
[00:01:02.451]We were able to give and take a little bit,
[00:01:04.844]add some features to make it more marketable so that,
[00:01:09.125]I think that's an attractive front porch,
[00:01:11.765]something that people would be willing to go out and buy
[00:01:14.985]and all that and stuff.
[00:01:18.689]This is the first house,
[00:01:19.770]and then I also heard from Jim today
[00:01:21.089]that this is the house that we actually ended up going with.
[00:01:26.266]So this is the house that will be constructed out in Friend
[00:01:29.642]starting some time in the near future, I guess,
[00:01:31.841]to be determined.
[00:01:33.304]But it will be built by a local contractor and
[00:01:38.209]I'm excited to see what turns out from it.
[00:01:40.366]But when we were deciding on all of these floor plans,
[00:01:42.698]we really wanted to make sure that these floor plans had
[00:01:48.302]three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an attached garage,
[00:01:51.447]an unfinished basement, just ample space for a young family
[00:01:55.643]to come into the community
[00:01:57.611]and have their kids go to school in Friend,
[00:02:01.547]have maybe a new married couple possibly move out to Friend
[00:02:05.628]and (laughs)
[00:02:09.465]start a family within the community
[00:02:11.721]and, hopefully, stay there for the rest of their lives.
[00:02:14.423]So that's kind of the goal but this would be at least
[00:02:16.307]the starter home to get them to that point.
[00:02:19.891]We applied for a housing grant
[00:02:21.823]with the Nebraska Investment Finance Authority
[00:02:24.638]and it was a 50/50 grant.
[00:02:27.008]And the goal of this grant was to
[00:02:31.056]figure out the demand for affordable housing within Friend
[00:02:34.889]and also find a reuse for the manor
[00:02:38.394]that had just recently closed in Friend.
[00:02:40.880]Between the time Friend applied for the Serviceship interns,
[00:02:46.961]or for Paul and I to come out there,
[00:02:48.985]and the time that we actually showed up,
[00:02:51.400]there was this manor in the hospital that closed down.
[00:02:54.794]It wasn't being profitable and
[00:02:58.633]the owners of the hospital decided they would much rather
[00:03:02.353]lose the manor than lose the entire thing.
[00:03:04.943]So they made the tough decision of closing it
[00:03:07.356]and now there's, I think it's something over
[00:03:10.981]12,000 square feet just in this hospital.
[00:03:14.740]It's a very nice area, we worked in there all summer.
[00:03:16.881]But they wanted to find some use for it
[00:03:19.849]so that way people within the community
[00:03:22.664]could possibly use it for maybe a workout facility,
[00:03:28.827]an entrepreneurship center, kind of an innovation hub,
[00:03:32.360]or possibly assisted living.
[00:03:34.897]There's a lot of stuff to go into that
[00:03:36.714]and we found this grant
[00:03:38.535]that we thought we could apply for and get,
[00:03:41.672]and we did actually end up getting it.
[00:03:44.377]It would cost a total of $20,000
[00:03:46.778]and I think the community has 18 months to complete it,
[00:03:49.425]is that right, yeah.
[00:03:50.716]So the community has 18 months,
[00:03:53.050]so around February, March of 2018 to get this study done
[00:03:59.453]with some firm to be decided, I guess.
[00:04:03.222]I think they required only three letters of recommendation
[00:04:06.653]but we ended up getting over five or something.
[00:04:09.158]It was crazy because the community was so supportive
[00:04:13.081]of the idea of, first of all, figuring out what to do
[00:04:15.690]with all these spec houses that we were looking into
[00:04:17.898]and how many would they need year to year,
[00:04:20.498]and everything like that.
[00:04:21.994]And then also what to do with the manor
[00:04:23.457]because people love the manor.
[00:04:26.805]People wanted it to stay around forever
[00:04:28.576]but if it's not being profitable,
[00:04:30.315]they kind of have to do something.
[00:04:34.618]People were very supportive of us applying for this grant
[00:04:37.092]and I'm glad the community was awarded the funds
[00:04:39.551]to complete this study.
[00:04:41.324]So I'm excited to hear about what it finds,
[00:04:43.762]hopefully, in the next year or two.
[00:04:45.768]How do we get people to hear about
[00:04:47.686]all of this housing in Friend?
[00:04:49.330]And Jim was especially interested in social media.
[00:04:52.353]Now, Paul and I, being the young people that we are,
[00:04:54.770]should be experts in social media more or less (laughs),
[00:05:03.620]just started looking into different ways
[00:05:05.417]we could market these houses.
[00:05:08.395]Well, the more we started looking into it,
[00:05:10.133]the more we started to realize that it would be better
[00:05:12.709]just in general to start marketing the community as a whole.
[00:05:16.665]When I was out in Friend and I would talk to people
[00:05:19.011]from outside the community
[00:05:20.621]that maybe weren't familiar with Friend,
[00:05:22.207]they would always hear about it and just kind of think,
[00:05:26.587]"Oh, it's a small town, there isn't really much there,"
[00:05:29.131]if they're from a big city like Lincoln.
[00:05:31.177]But the people who have heard about it,
[00:05:33.038]it's a really nice community.
[00:05:34.835]Part of the problem is just getting the word out
[00:05:36.742]that there is a community out there that people always love,
[00:05:40.640]that people go to and that kind of thing.
[00:05:42.655]So it just turned into,
[00:05:45.967]how do we just market the community as a whole?
[00:05:48.232]And we started doing that through Facebook.
[00:05:50.741]So we started this page called Friend, Nebraska, USA.
[00:05:54.384]So we started out, no one knew about the page
[00:05:58.581]so it had zero page likes, it was brand new.
[00:06:00.919]And by the time we left, it had reached 284 page likes
[00:06:05.485]and had reached over 18,000 people.
[00:06:08.073]So then we also started a Twitter page.
[00:06:10.530]I came up here, I took a Marketing class in the spring
[00:06:13.119]and I talked with my Marketing professor and he said that
[00:06:15.500]what a lot of communities don't know how to do
[00:06:17.650]is use Twitter correctly.
[00:06:19.352]You would think that in a community of a thousand people,
[00:06:23.390]jut this big mentality,
[00:06:25.499]like you would think in a community of a thousand people,
[00:06:27.208]you wouldn't have a lot to tweet about on a daily basis.
[00:06:29.752]In fact, it's the opposite.
[00:06:31.269]You can actually tweet a lot about a community of that size.
[00:06:37.554]I forget exactly how many tweets we had
[00:06:39.597]but it was a lot, a couple of tweets a day.
[00:06:42.531]And we didn't have as many followers as we did for Facebook
[00:06:47.821]but we still reached over 4500 people
[00:06:50.283]just because of the way Twitter can be used
[00:06:53.101]to spread information about the community.
[00:06:58.963]Say there's a City Council meeting.
[00:07:00.592]You can post the time for the City Council meeting
[00:07:03.273]on Twitter and that way people can say,
[00:07:04.712]"Oh, hey that's cool, I want to go to that."
[00:07:06.885]And you can post about the Fourth of July
[00:07:09.287]or pretty much anything else.
[00:07:10.888]So there's a lot of great opportunities on Twitter to
[00:07:17.807]create buzz by just posting frequently
[00:07:21.560]using 140 characters or less.
[00:07:26.587]It was pretty successful in the time that we were there.
[00:07:29.244]I mean, it's probably more successful
[00:07:30.303]than my Twitter page so (laughs).
[00:07:32.385]So Friend currently has a website
[00:07:34.441]and it hasn't been updated for a couple of years
[00:07:37.650]just because coding is complicated,
[00:07:40.501]I don't even know how to do it.
[00:07:42.191]But we started looking into ways that we could have them
[00:07:45.804]either create a new website
[00:07:46.871]or look into ways to update their website
[00:07:49.229]in an affordable and easy-to-learn way.
[00:07:53.691]So we started looking into that
[00:07:56.831]and then also broadened that scope to include
[00:08:00.235]Facebook, Twitter, and just marketing in general.
[00:08:02.800]What can the community do to,
[00:08:04.663]maybe put signs along the Interstate
[00:08:07.114]or use brochures or other means of marketing,
[00:08:13.047]to get people to become aware of the community?
[00:08:16.027]So part of that was doing a short survey of local residents
[00:08:21.086]to learn what people liked about Friend.
[00:08:22.884]And we actually got about 80 responses, which,
[00:08:25.711]in a community of a thousand people, that's quite a bit.
[00:08:28.887]So that was really cool to see those responses,
[00:08:33.868]see what people liked about Friend and
[00:08:38.574]what some people,
[00:08:40.174]who maybe aren't always at the City Council meetings,
[00:08:43.627]what they thought about some of the things going on in town,
[00:08:47.376]all the positive reactions to even starting the survey,
[00:08:52.921]which was really cool.
[00:08:55.308]Once word got out, so many people were excited
[00:08:57.196]to hear that something's going to happen,
[00:08:59.355]people are going to find out about Friend
[00:09:00.738]and hopefully we'll have more tourist visitors,
[00:09:02.888]that kind of thing.
[00:09:04.371]It was really cool to see how many people
[00:09:07.554]came out to that farewell dinner.
[00:09:10.214]I remember my dad was out there and he was like,
[00:09:12.588]"In a big city, you would never see,"
[00:09:14.126]I think we had somewhere between 30 and 40 people show up
[00:09:17.737]just to see what we did over the summer.
[00:09:20.680]And those are people that I can go to
[00:09:23.234]if I have questions about their fields of interest.
[00:09:25.327]So there's people in general business,
[00:09:28.222]there's people in manufacturing.
[00:09:31.222]There's just a wide variety of different people,
[00:09:34.137]different experiences that now we have access to.
[00:09:38.694]And we know that we made an impact for them
[00:09:40.453]because they care about Friend as a community
[00:09:42.720]and want to see it succeed.
[00:09:44.731]"The RFI Serviceship provides the idea, but it lets you
[00:09:47.169]"take the reins and light a spark in a community."
[00:09:49.515]And that, I think, is really true because,
[00:09:52.794]when Paul and I went out there,
[00:09:54.045]we're not marketing people or community development people.
[00:09:59.572]He's in engineering, I'm in actuarial science.
[00:10:02.019]It just doesn't make sense to do that,
[00:10:04.398]but once we got out there, they just say,
[00:10:08.311]"Here you go and do what you can with it."
[00:10:11.569]And I think it ended up turning into
[00:10:13.109]a really great project for us.
[00:10:15.308]We learned a lot about how we work
[00:10:17.247]and how we can use our experience,
[00:10:21.733]even if it's not exactly in our field of interest,
[00:10:23.919]to go out into a community and make an impact.
[00:10:27.920]So I was really glad that I had the opportunity for this.
[00:10:31.487]So that's it.

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RFI Student Serviceshi 2016 | Friend, Neb.

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