Sourdough and Video Games: Quarantine-Friendly Pursuits Have Associations, Too

In the year since the pandemic sent most people into some form of long-term isolation, plenty of us have turned to a saving grace: hobbies.

They’re not just ways to pass the time once spent commuting or visiting friends and family. They’ve also been an important strategy for maintaining mental health and fending off stress during a strange time, according to the American Heart Association  (opens in a new tab).

As the pandemic endures, associations for America’s rediscovered pastimes have taken advantage of the messaging opportunities that emerged. Here are just a few examples:

Home Baking Association  (opens in a new tab). Near the start of the pandemic, it seemed that everyone was suddenly baking their own bread. The Home Baking Association leveraged the surging search traffic to its page “How to Bake a Loaf of Bread  (opens in a new tab)” to help would-be bakers get started. Additionally, the group’s director of programs, Sharon Davis, found herself busy with media requests and shared her knowledge in articles for Bloomberg  (opens in a new tab), Consumer Reports  (opens in a new tab), How Stuff Works  (opens in a new tab), and The Stranger  (opens in a new tab).

American Craft Council  (opens in a new tab). “The state of American craft has never been stronger,” according to a recent headline  (opens in a new tab) in Smithsonian Magazine. The pandemic was a huge factor  (opens in a new tab) in that. The American Craft Council supported this interest with a content strategy that helps people new to crafting find a path in. The council put together two  (opens in a new tab) separate  (opens in a new tab) multipart virtual events through its American Craft Forum video series last spring. It plans to hold a third  (opens in a new tab) starting April 1.

Cat Fanciers’ Association  (opens in a new tab). Cats rule the internet, and they’re keeping people sane at home. The Cat Fanciers’ Association has been taking advantage of that to build interest in virtual events that highlight new kinds of creative cat imagery. CFA hosted Virtual Cat Competitions, encouraging people to share fanciful photos or videos of their cats. “The cat fancy has never before been so accessible to so many people,” said Iris Zinck, chair of CFA’s Virtual Cat Competition Committee, in a news release  (opens in a new tab). “This isn’t just a placeholder for regular shows, it’s something new that offers the online public a whole different way to share their love of cats!”

Entertainment Software Association  (opens in a new tab). ESA is best known among gamers for its popular E3 event, which was canceled last year. (It’s going remote this year.) But gaming itself  (opens in a new tab), a hobby generally enjoyed indoors in front of a television set, saw a lot of success in 2020, with two huge console releases—the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series line—last fall. Early in the pandemic, ESA supported a digital petition  (opens in a new tab) encouraging gamers to stay home, and it used its website Game Generation  (opens in a new tab) to highlight the ways that gamers were managing  (opens in a new tab). As CEO Stanley Pierre-Louis told VentureBeat last fall  (opens in a new tab), “We were one of the earliest industries to transition to work from home. We were able to pivot in ways that other industries weren’t able to do. The consoles came out. That’s part of what has really driven the enormous growth of the industry.”

National Gardening Association  (opens in a new tab). With supply chains disrupted and shortages of consumer goods reported at grocery stores last spring, there was brief concern about possible food scarcity—which drummed up interest in gardening. But even as food supplies quickly stabilized, gardeners kept their hands in the dirt: People reported in May 2020  (opens in a new tab) that the National Gardening Association was fielding half a million questions each week. Executive Director Dave Whitinger told the magazine that about one in four U.S. households grew their own vegetables in 2019. “I would not be surprised to learn that 50 percent did it this year,” he said. To tap into the interest, the group created a pandemic gardening landing page  (opens in a new tab) with details on how to get started, including where to find seeds.

USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association  (opens in a new tab). This group was founded only last year, but it drew quick support. The association has already held several events, including a virtual COVID-19 fundraiser last fall  (opens in a new tab). “There is supposed to be a dopamine hit every time you put puzzle pieces together. So assembling a puzzle is just a constant dose of happy chemicals,” said one of the group’s cofounders, Tammy McLeod, in a New York Times article  (opens in a new tab) from December.

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