Turku

A view from our office window. A fall in Turku.

Hi Mobbers,

I´ll have to shout it out. Just got a phone call from the biggest (free) city newspaper here in Turku. They said we´d won the Ecological deed of the year 2009 award with our Carrotmob happening in march! Looks like someone has to pick up the award and recruit more members in award celebration on 9th of October

And i’m going to keep you informed of our second happening, which we´ll start planning in two weeks time. This time, i feel, it’s going to be somewhat different!

Have a great fall you all!!

Jari Liitola, Carrotmob Turku, Finland

Hey.

Carrotmob has been slow locally, but nationally we are making huge campaign with various organizers here in Finland. We are challenging Finnish consumers to change their daily electricity into re-newable wind power.

The background story for that is typical. Our representatives are doing nothing. In comparison, our neighbour Sweden has declared 40% savings in climate emissions per person by the year 2020. Finland is doing nothing. ….And that my friends is pissing the Carrotmob out! That’s why we have to do things ourselves. We’ll have to tell those representatives, that people are interested in climate change, and are willing to do small and constant actions to lower our emissions!

In a way things are simple. Either you do or you don’t. We’d like to do

We’re sorry our campaign site is in Finnish only, but still, take a look. We’re proud that in a week there’s already 421 devotees in our database, and the advertising hasn’t yet begun!

http://www.ilmastomaajoukkue.fi/

In Facebook

Jari Liitola, Carrotmob Turku

Hi again from the sunny Turku. The spring has arrived here and life is good again after a long foggy winter. Turku Carrotmob has taken a break after a succesfull event and are now in the “planning stage”. We’re wondering what to do next and when to do it.

There’s been a talk of organising an event in a food store, but it’s in veeery early stages.

Actually we have an interesting system here in Finland when talking about the distribution channels for food stores (and they’re owners too). There’s only two finnish ones KESKO and S-RYHMÄ, and they control about 99,95678% of the entire market. That means it is very much harder to organize an event into food store here, than pretty much anywhere else… but we Cmobsters are not quitters!

Summer is arriving, and that might also mean there’s not going to be any big activity within Carrotmob as most of us are on our summer leave. But i sure am going to tell if something happens before it. Keep up the best work all around this planet of ours and keep commenting this blog (thank you everyone who’ve already done so!).

Peace,

Jari, Mobster in Turku

My name is Jari Liitola and I’m 38 years young man. I live by the river Aurajoki, right in the center of Turku, Finland. You can see couple shots of my hometown in the pictures below. I also have a super duper wonderful wife for 16 years, Pia.

I work in our own web marketing company called Viidakkorumpu (translated it means jungle drum i.e. expression for Word of Mouth). We will celebrate our three year birthday in the summer. So in other words my life is good.

I think it was in the summer of 2008 when I first stumbled into hilarious (and smart) video in YouTube. The sympathetic, bearded fellow rumbled something about the power of people as consumers…hmmm…interesting. He mentioned the word Carrotmob, so I had to do some digging around the web. And soon enough I was sold and decided to open our own Turku Carrotmob group in Facebook. As I was doing that, there were various group openings around the Finland… Helsinki, Oulu, Jyvaskyla, Tampere, etc. Seems that we all woke up in Finland at the same time

Then I sent invitations through Facebook and used word of mouth… and kaboom, there were 300 of us at Carrotmob Turku! Now the number is over 700 and around 10 of us meet regurarly.

We had our first Carrotmob happening on 14th of March. We sent offer requests into 20 restaurants. The winner promised us a full 100% of the day’s revenues.

So we started to invite people into three restaurants (1,2,3), all in the opposite sides of town and owned by the same people. That way it was easy for everyone to access at least one of them.

The day went well. There was around 2000 visits altogether and we raised 6000 Euros for the restaurant owners. A week after the event we held a meeting with the owner. With me was our energy expert, Anne Ahtiainen from the company Valonia. Restaurant owner told us that they had already made various energy improvings, but there were two large freezers which will have to replace within six months or a year. Those will cost around 6000 Euros each, so they will put another 6000 and they can replace both of them with Carrotmobs help.

Now we are wondering where to organize the next event. Maybe into food store or market? We will see, but I’m sure to keep you all up to date with our life here in the southern Finland. I’m just really happy to be a part of this great idea, which I’m sure will turn into a huge thing in a couple of years as Brent & co. in Frisco will get all their plans started.

All the best, and as the english say – cheers,

Jari Liitola, editor of Carrotmob Turku

See my hometown: