Photo Credit: Alex Goetz
Enticing people to go outside on a March morning with temperatures hovering around freezing is not unheard of at Metroparks Toledo in Ohio. Attracting nearly 2,500 people to traipse through a muddy construction site in the woods in late winter, however, was a first.
Participants in what turned out to be the largest Instagram Meetup in Ohio were drawn to something else that had not been done before—a treehouse village being built in the region’s largest park. Within days of the Meetup, photos with the hashtag #cannaleytreehousevillage had reached more than 1.5-million people on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
It was the buzz that marketing director Matt Killam was hoping for when he organized the event with the local visitor and convention bureau, Destination Toledo. “It goes to show the amount of excitement this project has generated,” he says. “Now, word is spreading exponentially.”