The “Fat City Café” Project

Fat City Café is a family-owned diner in SW Portland that offers breakfast & lunch. In 2020, they were hit with major hardships due to COVID-19 and were struggling to keep their business afloat. My sister, Sara Pardy, and I offered to step in with our social media marketing experience to help them navigate ways to support their business during the pandemic. A stronger social media presence became a major opportunity for them to maintain customer communication, event promotion, and online order promotion during lockdowns.

Due to the family-owned/small-business environment, it was very important for us to keep their social media presence very easy-going and natural. Our main tasks involved revamping their Instagram, adding content to their website, and promoting events.

The owner was very adamant about the “word-of-mouth” style that they had been using for years prior. She was adamant that we kept a casual marketing style in our work because it maintained brand authenticity. The goal: branch out of “word-of-mouth” marketing by implementing a casual social media presence – a modern approach to “word-of-mouth” marketing.

This experience exemplified how important a social media presence is for any business – even if it’s a small, family-owned business. Since starting this project in 2020, we have continued to make weekly posts to their Instagram account, we helped them raise thousands of dollars in GoFundMe donations, we quadrupled their Instagram following, and we have improved the communication with their customers.

Instagram Work: 

Linked below is the Fat City Café Instagram page. Before my sister and I stepped in to help this local business, their social media usage was minimal. We wanted the diner to be more active on Instagram with the goal of reaching their current customers and potential new customers. We officially took over the Instagram page on August 13th, 2020. These posts are beneficial in creating a sense of community for the diner – it allows the diner to interact with its customers, it notifies customers of any changes to the restaurant environment (due to COVID-19, Oregon fire/smoke reasons, etc.), and it notifies customers of upcoming events (like their famous “Spaghetti Night”).

This was a very successful addition to Fat City Café’s advertising. By being more active on Instagram, it reminded customers to come into the diner to eat and/or order take-out. We also increased the turnout at events, like Spaghetti Night, when we started promoting it on Instagram.

Since we started helping with their Instagram page in August, we have pretty much completely taken control of the account. We create all the content for the posts and we respond to the comments and DM’s from customers.

WEBSITE WORK:

Linked below is the Fat City Café website. Another task we had was polishing their official website page. We added an “about” page that is meant to introduce the community to the family that owns the diner. This is an important addition to the website because it lets people know the story behind the diner, and, if people like to help local businesses, this reassures them that they are helping out the right family.

Aside from adding the “about” page, we fixed some issues with the website’s layout, wording, and navigation.

Promotional Work:

Another important task we were given, was helping promote their business. Instagram was our main method of promotion, and, while this method was useful, we decided that should test out other methods of promotion.

We found that the most successful alternative for promoting a local business was by using the “Nextdoor” app. This app reaches all nearby neighborhoods, so by promoting Fat City through here, we were able to reach hundreds of community members. An example of the success we had on the Nextdoor app was when we promoted “Spaghetti Night” for the very first time - we were able to reach so many community members, that Fat City sold out on orders for that weekend!