Meal Plan Giveaway

Meal Plan Giveaway

April 18, 2020

Hello and Happy Saturday (even if weekends in quarantine don’t feel unlike every other day).

I’m so close to hitting my next milestone on my Instagram: reaching 4k followers. Last time I wanted to reach a milestone I offered a giveaway. Now, I’ve been on my soapbox about giveaways before and if you’ve been following me for a while you’re probably familiar with how I feel about them. I’ll recap, shortly. I don’t love those loop following giveaways you see so many bloggers do. Some even do multiple a week! But I just can’t get on board with offering Amazon gift cards, Disney vacations, fake Gucci belts, Target gift cards or Paypal cash prizes just to gain followers. Plus – I’ll let you in on a secret. The bloggers you see posting these giveaways? They did not purchase the things they’re giving away. They either “paid in” to the giveaway with a group of other bloggers you’re required to follow or simply just joined a group thread where someone else supplied the knockoff designer item or Target gift card. Clearly, I kinda hate these things. But on the other hand…I do want to grow my community and reach my milestones. So, what’s a girl to do? The best solution I’ve come up with so far is to share something of value and offer that as a giveaway to “incentivize” people that like following my blog to enter a giveaway by sharing about it, tag me in their stories, encourage people they know to follow me, etc.

The last time I did this giveaway, I came up with a few ideas and then I polled my followers to see what they would want to win in a giveaway. And a curated, personalized meal plan won. I wasn’t sure how I’d do it, but since the giveaway lasted a few weeks until I hit my goal, I had some time to play around with it. I started messing with design templates and different ideas and started formulating something I actually really liked. When the winner won the giveaway, I reached out to her and asked about budget, dietary needs, allergies, etc. And then I made what I considered to be a realistic week of dinners based on our conversation. Everything I included were dishes I had made in my own kitchen and loved. They were recipes I’d either created or found elsewhere but tweaked over time to make them perfect. And I gave them to her in a file, all customized and branded. Something about it felt genuine, real and heartfelt. Maybe that’s because cooking is such a special thing to me and it felt like a giveaway that I could feel good about that, surprisingly, people had gotten on board with too!

All that to say – I’ve decided to do another personalized meal plan giveaway to help me reach 4k. I’m hoping that people enter because they pay attention to my Meal Plan Mondays and have a genuine interest in receiving their own meal plans that will help them be more intentional in the kitchen or because they just like me and Down in the Hollow and want to see continued success. Either way, I’m going for it!

I wanted to share here my last one I created so you could have an idea of what to expect! Here it is!