Toddlers, with attention spans similar to that of a goldfish, can be difficult to keep entertained, especially if they never get to leave home. Even though they find the simplest things exciting, their little brains need constant stimulation — a need Johnson County resident Hayley Warack noticed two summers ago when she was just months away from giving birth to her second child.
Warack, along with her husband, Andy Warack, have worked hard to launch The JoCo Know, a weekly newsletter resource detailing things to do in Johnson County.
The JoCo Know launched on social media two months ago and sent out the first newsletter at the beginning of October. In its first month, the newsletter has already received 840 subscribers, Warack said.
The idea spurred for Hayley Warack, who has a background in marketing, when she spent the summer sifting through Facebook and several websites every weekend, trying to find everything going on in Johnson County.
She had been working remotely for different marketing agencies since the pandemic. Through her work, she began to develop a way to use her expertise to impact the community and get out of her house more often.
“The newsletter and the social media account were kind of a product of us trying to do something different, draw some attention, build an audience, build some demand, and be able to open up the conversation with businesses about their marketing and business strategies,” she said.
Every day, Hayley Warack searches for the events on Facebook and other different websites and puts it all in the weekly newsletter to help save people the trouble of looking on their own.
“It’s robust, but it’s inclusive of everything going on in Johnson County,” she said. “It’s easy to scan, easy to share, [and] easy to find different types of activities.”
Hayley Warack’s end goal is to work with businesses on their local marketing, which she said there is a competitive area for that. The development of The JoCo Know has required a lot of creativity, finding the right resources, networking, and reaching out to businesses.
“I’ve been really using leverage, or using insights from what’s worked well in newsletters and social media to then take that onto my outreach,” she said.
Despite being the one to consolidate the list, Hayley Warack was not the only one in Johnson County looking for a resource like The JoCo Know. North Liberty resident Laura Schneberger found out about the newsletter on Facebook and has found the resource helpful, particularly for toddler activities in the area.
“I just really appreciated that there was like a concise, consolidated place for information,” she said. “I felt like it kind of got lost on me, or I felt like I was missing out on a lot of events. So it was great to see that there was one place that had all this information.”
John Kenyon, executive director of the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature, found use for the newsletter when he connected with Warack and was able to advertise the Iowa City Book Festival, which took place in the middle of October.
“Anytime you have people who are taking the time to go through everything that’s happening in the community and finding a clear, concise way to present it is going to help,” he said.
While Kenyon was unaware if people found out about the festival specifically because of the newsletter or not, he said he appreciated another outlet for advertisement, attempting to display the event in as many places as possible.
“Having a new kind of thing out there, a new kind of channel, for people to encounter what’s going on is going to help,” Kenyon said.