Aaron Perlut was fed up with negative stories about St. Louis.
So, he wrote an article for Forbes last year with the headline St. Louis Doesn’t Suck.
Then, bang, social media explosion, loads of people start tweeting about what makes the city cool.
Now he wants to focus some of that hometown pride.
“It’s trying to really harness the ideas of the greater St. Louis community and really use those ideas to better position our community as a great place to live, work, play, what have you,” Perlut says.
Perlut is the co-founder of a new nonprofit called Rally St. Louis that’s seeking online submissions for ideas to promote the St. Louis region.
From public art to a full scale marketing campaign, the group hopes to fund the ideas of everyday people and brand the region as a great place to live.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a housewife or a corporate CEO or somewhere in between, we want ideas,” Perlut says. “Because there is such great creativity in this region that hasn’t really had the opportunity shine outside of our community and demonstrate how progressive of a town this really is.”
Ideas can be submitted to the group’s website and each month the five with the most online votes will be evaluated by a group of marketing professionals and be assigned a budget.
The five ideas will then be put back on the Rally St. Louis website where community members can donate to have them completed. If an idea doesn’t get fully funded the people who donated to that idea will get their money back.
Voting on ideas will open up at the start of next month.
