Late last fall, three anonymous residents from Baldwin City descended on Iola with the intention of judging this town’s book by its cover.
They toured the downtown square, hiked the trails, cast an evaluative eye over the town’s parks. They entered shops and businesses bent on judging the friendliness of the establishment’s staff and the ease with which they could walk from store to store or business to business. They never announced themselves, these “secret shoppers”; they merely kept their eyes peeled, their faculties engaged, and they took notes. Their intentions were entirely friendly. They admired the modest grandeur of Iola’s many churches, and attempted to assess the energy each church injected into the community. They wanted to know where kids in Iola go to play. They wanted to know where to find a convenient town map. They asked: How active are the social clubs? How visible are the police? How well maintained are the clinics? How safe are the streets and sidewalks surrounding the schools? What is the quality of the housing stock?
These anonymous volunteers were participants in the K-State Research and Extension “First Impressions” program, which initiated the “secret shopper” project with the goal of highlighting for the spotlit town its strengths and weaknesses as they announce themselves to the first-time visitor. The program, modeled on a project forged at the University of Wisconsin-Extension, is an exchange between two similarly sized Kansas towns. In keeping with the “sister city” approach, Iola sent a handful of its citizens to Baldwin City.
The strengths of such an approach are obvious: It is how most of Iola’s tourists experience the town — spending an hour or two on the square while passing through, or grabbing lunch in a local restaurant, or maybe on a day or weekend trip to explore Allen County’s recreational trails.
But the limited uses of a “first impressions” approach are glaring, too: The judgements are based on such a small sample size — a one-day visit during a single month — and the results are purely anecdotal (i.e., diagnosing the quality of customer service at an establishment based on a single visit).
On Monday evening, Kansas State University’s Community Vitality Specialist, Nancy Daniels, presented a bullet-pointed rundown of the group’s impressions.
Web presence
The anonymous envoy garnered their first “first impression” by visiting Iola online. Participants were uniformly impressed by the City of Iola’s website, praising its user-friendliness, the richness of its information, and its mobile-device compatibility. They called the site “a positive introduction to Iola.”
The Drive-through
The volunteers’ first assignment was to conduct a five-minute uninterrupted self-guided drive around town.
The downtown square was, to one visitor in particular, an obvious, aesthetic amenity. The “impressive biking and walking trails” caught another volunteer’s eye. The same volunteer was impressed to find a vigorous local newspaper — where in Baldwin City they have none — while a third visitor praised Iola’s “well-kept streets.” The architectural attractiveness of the Bowlus Fine Arts Center was noted by one of the volunteers, who paid the same compliment to the city’s water plant.
The visitors, to a person, found fault with some of the city’s signage: the lack of signs greeting those entering town from the south; the insufficient signage pointing visitors toward the downtown square when arriving into town from Highway 59 [ed: a perplexing review, as Highway 59 lies well west of Iola] ; and, while there are many directional signs in evidence when entering town on Highway 54, the print is too small to read while driving.
