On May 13 I pitched Glitter at the Fitler Club, five minutes plus five of questions, as one of five finalists. We won first place and $25,000.
The competition is run by the Women's Opportunities Resource Center and the Women's Committee for the 250th, as part of Women Investing in Women, tied to Philadelphia's America250 year.
I knew going in that Ellen Yin was one of the judges, which made the morning a particularly meaningful full-circle moment. She was one of my first bosses early in my career. Watching her build businesses that made Philadelphia a more vibrant, welcoming and tasty city was inspiring to me as a young professional, and it genuinely shaped how I think about entrepreneurship, community and impact. Getting to pitch Glitter in front of her was extra special.
What we spent it on
Growth, and specifically a question we had never been able to afford to answer.
Glitter grows block by block. A neighbor signs up, tells the block, the block funds a cleaning. That works, but it is slow, and it means the blocks that get clean are the blocks where somebody happened to take it on. We wanted to know what happens if we stop waiting for that person and go concentrate real outreach on a lot of blocks at once, working with the civic association that already knows the neighborhood.
So we ran that test: a concentrated outreach and cleaning campaign across dozens of blocks in one neighborhood, with the Center City Residents Association. That is written up here: shareglitter.com/civic
The rest went toward launching five new services beyond block cleaning, which is its own post: shareglitter.com/services
What it taught us
The thing that moves a block is a neighbor, not a company.
Every version of outreach we have tried that looks like marketing performs worse than one person who actually lives there knocking on a door. We have learned to strip the sales signals out of it: no Glitter branding, no clipboard, no iPad. Our ambassadors are Glitter customers who pledge on their own block, they knock in their own neighborhood in their own clothes, and they pull up the neighbor's block page on their own phone so you can see what your street would get.
That is less scalable than a campaign and more effective than one, which is an annoying thing to learn when you have just been handed money to scale.
What we are doing about it
Hiring more ambassadors, and paying them properly.
It is $25 an hour, plus commission equal to the first month of pledges from every neighbor you bring on, for cleaning and for the new services. We went from a handful of ambassadors over the summer to about seven now, and we are still adding.
The neighborhoods with the most room and the least outreach right now are Wash West, Hawthorne, Rittenhouse and Fitler Square, Passyunk, Fishtown and Point Breeze. If you live on one of those blocks and you already use Glitter, or you would be willing to pledge on your own block, that is the job: shareglitter.com/apply
The part I keep thinking about
What started as an idea that neighbors could collectively fund weekly cleaning for their own block has grown into hundreds of blocks cleaned every week across the city. Most of what got us here was slow.
What a prize like this actually buys is permission to run the experiment before you can prove it will work. We would not have spent our own money finding out, because if it had gone badly it would have been an expensive lesson. It gave us a real answer, and the answer is shaping what we fund next.
Congratulations to the other four finalists: ESP Effect, Revive Therapy Services, Beyond the Bell Tours and Kitty On Top Bartending. Thank you to WORC, to the Women's Committee for the 250th, to the Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation, and to the judges and organizers.
And thank you to every neighbor who has subscribed because they knew their block deserved better. Philadelphia deserves clean streets in every neighborhood, and we are going to keep building toward that.
