As hinted at in my post about how Habitat will never "take off", I used Habitat to organise an Easter Egg Hunt in my local town in the UK. I wanted to do something fun for my local community and to see how Habitat held up as a tool to help with that.

The "Easter Eggs"

The "Easter Eggs" that I was going to task the residents of my local town to find were film canisters with stickers on. Inside each canister was a printed note with a secret word on it:

You’ve found an easter egg! To find more, go to eggs.example.com.

For a chance at winning a prize, email eggs@example.com with the secret word for this easter egg. The secret word is:

ARTEMIS

Please put this back inside the film canister and hide it exactly where you found it for the next person to find.

The Landing Page

I thought that the full Habitat interface might be a little bit confusing for anyone who wanted to know more about the Easter Egg Hunt and wanted to provide a dedicated interface for the landing page.

I launched a basic nginx docker container and created a bunch of HTML files, each with slightly different wording. Big text, no navigation menu or anything like that:

• before.html - This basically said "We're going to do an Easter Egg Hunt for our local town, come back on 3rd April 11 AM to play!"
• during.html - "The time has arrived" with a link to the Habitat category for the Easter Egg Hunt.
• after.html - "Time's up!"

The pages also contained a list of anticipated questions and their answers:

• What are the rules?
• How will I be able to find the Easter Eggs?
• How do I win a prize?
• How long do I have to find the Easter Eggs?
• Why are you doing this?
• Who is doing this?
• Isn't this littering?

With these in place, I could simply replace index.html with each file when the time came.

The Flyer

I designed the flyer on Canva and printed them with Banana Print. It was the cheapest I could find. I posted the flyers in letterboxes and gave a bunch in to a local cafe and my local library.

Hiding the Easter Eggs

I really underestimated the amount of time I'd need for this. It took my wife and I nearly 3 hours to hide them all throughout my local town.

For each hidden Easter Egg, I'd create a post on my local Habitat instance using the map component to show the location, a photo and a clue in the title of the post.

The Big Day

I had a bunch of different fears about the Easter Egg Hunt -- would people struggle to use the map on Habitat to find the location? Would my home server crumble under the pressure of a sudden influx of traffic? Will anybody do the Easter Egg Hunt at all?

Keeping an eye on server logs, that last fear disappeared. I could see a sudden influx of traffic navigating from the Easter Egg Hunt category page to various Easter Egg pages.

At the end of the first day, I saw evidence of people browsing the site but didn't know if anyone was out hunting for the Easter Eggs. I received no emails.

On the second day, we went and took our dog out for a walk, and saw several people trying to inconspicuously find the Easter Eggs! It was a blast to see! A few hours later, I got the first email:

I found 8

Please can I email all 8 words or should I do seperate ones?

and then another:

Hi to you all

We went on a fab walk to find secret hidden easter eggs each one with a treat of course. A couple were a bit tricky as mum’s map reading skills are not the best but I sniffed them out.

We met some fellow easter egg hunters on the way.

Here are our secret words

By the end of it we had 4 separate groups find all 10 words. This was my favourite email:

Thank you so much for putting this on for the community. My family (8 of us in total) had so much fun taking part! It got us out walking and talking which was brilliant. We could see how much time, effort and thought went into it and couldn’t be more grateful to you for creating the hunt. Here are our words that we found ;

This is what it's all about right here!

The Prizes

I've emailed each winner (and the first who submitted 8 words) to let them all know that they had won a prize. I'll be meeting them all in a local park today to hand them over.

Did you know that Easter Eggs are substantially cheaper to buy in the days following Easter?

Lessons Learned

If I was to do this again next year (I probably will) I wouldn't buy film canisters - they required a great deal of work to make them easy to open. I ended up drilling holes in the lids and running thick string through for leverage, which still wasn't enough so I had to file away in seal.

I purchased 200 flyers for ~£15 -- I think next time I'll try to spend the same amount of 100, as I don't think I needed as many after all, and spending a bit more on thicker paper would be a good idea as it was difficult to get thin paper into letterboxes without crumpling.

Habitat and my home server held up fine under the sudden influx of traffic. I was watching TV during the day with no adverse affect from the traffic on my standard home fibre internet.

I think most crucially though, I learned that there are people who are craving to do something fun and meaningful with friends and family in the local community and just need the incentive. I thoroughly recommend trying something like this.

This is so wholesome and heartwarming. What a great thing to do in your community, and such a great way to introduce people to Habitat as an idea and project.

Very well done.

This is fantastic, and I'm sure people had a blast finding the eggs. I have a couple of questions, if you have a moment: how much notice did you give people with those leaflets, and did you coordinate with the town before hiding them?

Thanks! I think I started sending flyers out about two weeks before. Unfortunately I think it was my wife posting an image of the flyers on Facebook that got most of the attention. I didn't coordinate with my local council. I feared they'd decline if I had asked them so I figured I'd rather ask for forgiveness rather than permission. We have some local things that people put up in this small town that would probably allow me to get away with it, such as "knitting Nana's" which is essentially crochet designs on top of postboxes and posts and stuff. So people do sometimes leave things about and it seems that everyone's happy with it. I was preempting some kind of resistance with the "isn't this littering?" question, in which I stated that all Easter eggs will be collected afterwards, and when I do, I'll take a black bag around with me to pick up any rubbish I find along the way, so those with the littering concern would hopefully see the net good in what I've done. Thankfully none of that resistance has come up. Perhaps if it was more popular I might have had a difficult conversation.