Your own "Cargos & Cakes" event in 12 easy steps.
- Solve The School Run
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
So, you’ve decided to host a Cargos & Cakes event? Hurray! Welcome to our Cargo Collective! Hosting is easy and inexpensive, with approximately £300 needed to host your first event (much less thereafter). Beyond that it’s energy and enthusiasm. Here’s a rough guide of things to think about, but every event will be different (that’s the joy!) and you know your area and your families best, so customise it to suit you. Our resource pack including editable flyers and social media assets, comms templates and more can be found here.
What exactly is a Cargo & Cakes event? Think of it as a speed date between families who are thinking about buying a cargo bike, and families who have already taken the plunge. It’s an opportunity to hear first hand now they work for families: What are the most affordable options? (Head to EBay for second hand options, or Our Bike community bike share.) What happens when it rains? (You can get rain covers). Will the kids fight? (Often! As they do in cars). How young can you start? (There are baby seats for 2 month olds available). Whether they are held in playgrounds or parks, they are fun events, which connect like-minded families and help the joy of cargo biking catch on in your area.
Choose a location. We’ve done most of our events in parks in close proximity to schools. To minimise the amount of time needed promoting the event it’s a good idea to make sure there is already a good number of families in the area, so pick a spot where families naturally gather - for example you could set up near a playground. You could also consider hosting within a school itself. Just ensure there’s a path for some cargo bike riding, and room for cargo bikes to turn. You might need to get council permission to hold the event in the park, so give yourself time for that (6-8 weeks). Contact their events or parks department. As it’s just a small event without any infrastructure, permission is straight forward and we’ve shared our risk assessment template here. Of course, there’s always a chance of rain, so we recommend hosting between May - October and finding a helpful tree to set up under in the event of drizzle ( it rained on our first event but we weren’t deterred!).
Choose a time (& a cake). We’ve done them in the morning (Cargos & Croissants!), the afternoon (Cargos & Cakes), Halloween (Cargos & Candy). The variety is endless. The key element is that there is sufficient footfall. We’ve found after school has tended to be the easiest slot to attract families and volunteers to. The cakes or croissants work very well as a way to attract people without them feeling sold to. Pre-wrapped cakes are the easiest way to comply with any food safety requirements that councils may have so we use Tunnocks tea cakes.
Event insurance. You will need event organiser insurance to host the event. We purchased ours here and it was £275 for up to 15 events per year, though there are multiple companies that offer the same. You will only need this for your first event and so subsequent events become much cheaper with just the costs of cakes.
Do you want sponsorship? To cover the costs of insurance and cakes you may be able to find local bike businesses or local shops such as cafes or toy shops to sponsor the event. For a small fee they can have their logo on the flyer which is then distributed around many of the family social networks in the area. We have also invited a local cargo bike business to join the event and supply a few trial bikes, which helps to ensure we have a good variety of bikes from trikes to two wheeler long tails. We also always bring an Our Bike with us, which is a rentable (from £3 an hour!) cargo bike, which is an affordable way for people to use a cargo bike for some of their local trips. If it’s available in your borough, we’d definitely recommend bringing it along.
Find your cargo-biking families! These are your experts, who will bring their bikes for other families to try. They’ll chat to the newbies about what’s so great about cargo life and all the tips from where to store them to baby seats. We use our personal contacts and networks to find families who already have bikes. You could send a call out message around school groups, local community forums or your local cycling clubs. We’ve found that if people have a cargo bike, they love it so much they are really up for talking about them at these events.
Find your attendees. The primary schools and nurseries around your location are your target audience. Look on the map to find them or you can also check out our school travel data to find local primary schools and see how far families are travelling. Use your network to find contacts because ideally you want to get some publicity in the school newsletter, as well as through local parent WhatsApp groups. We’ve got some comms templates here to use.
Start publicising your event. Once you’ve got everything in place, make your flyers. We have templates which you can adapt for your event. Turn them into jpegs and start sending them out via parent network WhatsApp groups, as well as by email to local schools. The same image can go on social media. Tag in all your local groups and forums, as they often repost your message. You can find the editable designs and comms templates in our resource pack. Here's an example of one of ours:
VIPs. Invite your councillors (they love it!), your local press, and anyone else you want to impress. It’s a great photo opportunity for supportive politicians.
Buy your cakes and you’re ready to go! The weather, of course, will be glorious! So now you just need to go and spread the word. [As above we use Tunnocks tea cakes for ease].
On the day. Any kids who come along to the event are usually pretty pleased with the cake/croissant offering, so that keeps them quiet for a bit. And as the event is held in a park there is generally plenty to keep them entertained, plus they love riding in the bikes! We don’t provide activities mainly as we’re really busy making sure that all the parents who attend are getting us much rich information as possible.
Safety? Parents who bring their cargo bikes along are often very happy to let other parents have a trial on their bike. The event organiser insurance doesn’t cover 3rd party damage or theft to volunteer’s bikes so we make sure that we let them know that. We then leave it to individual parents to decide what's best for them. The bike trial circuit is usually a short route always in sight of us and those trialling bikes often have bags and kids they’ve left behind with us, so risk of theft is minimal. We’ve not had any issues to date but leave it to parents to decide what they’re comfortable with.
What next? We always get the email addresses of attendees and follow up with information on what is available for those interested in cargo bikes locally - from insurance and locks, to sellers and storage. Our follow-up email is on our comms template here. They can then sign up to our newsletter or join our CargoLife Whatsapp group for further support. We also write up the event for local papers and blogs with some photos (with consent of those pictured) to help spread the word. Examples of our press releases in the resources folder. And do back it up with some of our findings on the London school run to highlight the urgency of solving the school run!
Any more questions? Drop us an email on hello@solvetheschoolrun.org.
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