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What does it take for people to make the move to a small town?

If you’re one of our growing community of readers, you know that Nebraska Rural Living is about celebrating the things that make the rural lifestyle appealing: safe neighborhoods, good schools, affordable housing and a relaxed, uncongested lifestyle that lets you know – and care about – your neighbors.

Utilizing a Rural Business Opportunity Grant (RBOG) from the U.S. Department of Agriculture through one of our sponsors, the South Platte United Chambers of Commerce, Nebraska Rural Living has launched a marketing campaign which we hope will counteract the negative stereotypes and promote living the way we do as a real, viable even practical alternative to living in crowded cities.

Here’s what we’ve done so far.

To discover what draws people to small towns, we conducted focus groups of recent transplants in Holdrege and McCook, Nebraska. From what we learned in these sessions, we crafted a survey questionnaire which we mailed to a random sample of our prospect database. The database for this experiment is made up of people living in Colorado who either graduated from Nebraska high schools or who made reservations at Nebraska state parks within the last three years.

The survey is designed to help us determine people’s attitudes toward the rural education system, small town safety and security, and rural “connectedness” to mainstream media, among other perceptions. Following the completion of a direct mail marketing campaign to this database, we will re-survey a sample of the same audience to see if there has been any shift in opinion on these specific areas.

Rural Business Opportunity Grant (RBOG) direct mail marketing campaign
Click to download postcards as a PDF

Many rural areas, and not just those in Nebraska, have gradually lost population as the once labor-intensive agricultural sector has consolidated and mechanized, and little if any job-producing industry has moved in to replace it. Charming little towns like ours have watched our school population shrink and our retail merchants struggle despite our safe streets, clean air, minimal traffic and all the other very positive aspects of a rural lifestyle. Our town, and scores of towns like ours, need to attract new residents in order to remain viable.

With what we learn, we hope to be able to influence some people living in urban centers to try – or return to – a rural lifestyle. We expect to be finalizing our results and drafting a final report within the next several weeks.

If you’d like to receive a summary of the results of our experiment by email, click here.

For many years Gene O. Morris was a writer for the McCook Gazette, and today takes on freelance assignments from his home in McCook, Neb. Phil Soreide is the editor of Nebraska Rural Living and works from his home in Holdrege, Neb.

To learn more about how you can be a writer for Nebraska Rural Living, and have your essays posted on this site, visit our 'Writers Wanted' page.

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