We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gary Casey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Gary, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our non-profit organization Community First Alliance’s mission is to create an environment for families to spend time together while enjoying fishing and recreation. Our mission helps with social behavior and underserved communities and families. We have a big need for this type of recreation for today’s families. We provide an event for the entire family at no cost, along with a health fair with free screenings, fishing, and food for all participants who register online. We have seen the social and economical impact it has on families. After working years with after school programs, we noticed the behavior connected to children who felt neglected for lack of recreational time spent with parents during the week, children were from both two parent and single parent households.

Our company has collected data on the positive outcome of each event over the last 10 years and we have seen what it means to families to be able to spend this quality time together with a day of family fun and recreation and that’s what is meaningful to our company.

Gary, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a Little Rock native, I have worked within my community for over 25 years. I love working with children and have spent over 20 years working with afterschool programs, and I love to fish. I have worked with my share that have behavior issues, due to neglect and lack of family time. I wanted to make a change, so I started a non-profit organization and named it ” Community First Alliance”.

Once our new company was established in 2015, I created an event called ” The Big Catch Community Kids’ Fishing and Health Fair” for families to come out and enjoy a day of family fun, fishing, and food, all at no cost to the families. We are a fishing event, that will stock a lake or pond in a community and invite the families out to fish and keep their catches. People can follow us @ www.c1a.life and on our social media pages “The Big Catch Fishing Derby” and “Community First Alliance”.

The participants also have the opportunity to receive a free health screening. We have been recognized as the largest family fishing event in Arkansas. I am mostly proud of the services we provide to our participants during our event. We have local vendors who participate set up at our event. The Big Catch Community Kids Fishing and Health Fair impacts our community by providing free meals and screenings for over 2,000 participants, we have had as many as 5,000 in attendance at our event in May of 2017. This program is ran solely on donations and sponsorships. Our companies goal is to offer this program to communities who desire to spend much needed time with their families through outdoor recreation and fishing.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Building an audience was difficult when the non-profit organization was launched, there was not a big budget for advertisement. I use to worked for some local radio stations in my earlier days and I learned a few ways of marketing a business from our sales department. I used those strategies to promoted my business with very little cost, one important strategy is that you can never say your business name enough, everyone can be a potential customer or client.

When promoting your business, remember, word of mouth is your best advertisement. All new businesses should take advantage of all the free social media sites at their disposal. I set up several pages to promote my business, I started off doing all of my posting to my social media pages and I would respond to questions and ask for ratings on my event, also ask people to share my page, this information gradually created a following. Last, create a small budget for advertising and start investing in your business, the hard work will start to pay off. Consistency is the key.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

My best source to retain and earn new clients, It’s our website during our registration for our events. We receive over 600 new registrants per event. Our email list for our event over the years have afforded us to have 5,000 plus participants on our email list. The emails were collected during registration and this continues to grow each event.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.c1a.life
• Instagram: TheBigCatchArk
• Facebook: thebigcatchfishingderby

Image Credits
Image credit Gary Casey