By Nrsimha Caitanya Dasa
Our 2015 Padayatra was a big success on many levels. This year we made many improvements in advertizing and cultural programs. The daily schedule is also getting more and more refined every year.
First of all, we made a completely new poster – targeted more to our main focus group: the simple people from villages and small towns. Also followed a new flyer with a poll intended to draw more people to our evening programs. It worked out very well. Last year about 800 people attended our programs and over 1200 people this year. A 50% increase !
We always distribute some prasadam during our evening program, usually cookies. This year we decided to take it a step further and started serving plates with pakoras, a dip and cherry tomatoes, which brought a very positive response. We can definitely see that people are much more affected by receiving a full meal rather than just a few sweets. We distributed a total of 1000 plates of prasadam during the evening programs, around 1000 bananas from the cart at the very end of the programs and 970 prasadam packages during our walks. This year we pioneered the whole thing but next year we want to take this prasadam distribution to a more professional level.
The last improvement we made in connection with the public programs were questionnaires that we distributed during the program and collected at the end. We asked people what they thought about our programs and we offered some ways they could stay connected with the devotees. We got some nice contacts and already came back twice to one village to give cooking lessons. We plan to return there more times.
Although our focus this year was to draw more people to evening programs and to start some kind of follow-up, book distribution was still the most important feature. There was not a big push like last year, but still 3 to 5 devotees managed to distribute a nice number of books, 2085 in total.
All in all, Padayatra 2015 was again one ecstatic event to be remembered for a long time!
