Learn from about the evolution of local media ecosystems and the power of proactive relationships with journalists. Clarify the differences between earned, paid, and owned media with examples of proactive, reactive, and earned media.
Messaging
Sub Categories: Messaging
Advancing Places: Engaging the Media
Learn from two seasoned professionals on the evolution of local media ecosystems and the power of proactive relationships with journalists. We will clarify the differences between earned, paid, and owned media, focus on earned media, on earned media and share examples of proactive and reactive/crisis communications. Join the conversation around different strategies, including having an in-house communications team versus working with an agency.
Become Your Own Hyperlocal Digital News Outlet
As traditional newsrooms continue to shrink and media habits change, now is the time to fill the void and create a hyperlocal news outlet inside your organization, moving beyond press releases and conventional blog content to develop the multimedia newsgathering and storytelling operation your community needs.
Advancing Places: Accessible Ways to Connect With Your Audience
In this session, you will learn about different types of podcasts and cable television programming produced by three IDA member organizations all with varying budgets and in different geographic regions of North America. From shoestring budgets all the way up to working with professional production teams, attendees will hear about lived experience and explore producing their own programming.
Friend or Foe – How to Effectively Manage the Media
Marketing is central to our work as downtown leaders. Understanding how the media works is key to getting your message out and making sure that your community is represented in the best light possible. Learn how to position yourself as a thought leader and become an effective and persuasive communicator.
Panelists:
Advancing Places: Downtown Recovery Strategies and Storytelling
Downtown leaders and marketing professionals around the world have been exploring new recovery strategies and storytelling. The depth and range of techniques used to elevate one’s district vary. In this session, speakers will share a variety of tactics from their own experiences and attendees can examine which approaches might work best for their district.
COVID-19 Daily Updates
At the very beginning of the pandemic, we saw a significant need in our downtown community for reliable, timely, easily accessible information and resources related to the pandemic. Though we are a member-based organization, we decided that for the good of our broader community, we would offer anyone a daily email that distilled information, data/statistics, resources, and more. This email has been going out to more than 12,000 individuals every single business day for an entire year.
Downtown Boca COVID-19 Marketing Initiatives
The CRA quickly realized COVID-19 would greatly impact the community. Its mission and activities needed to pivot immediately. The CRA’s new objective was two-fold. First and foremost was keeping the community informed on ever-changing safety protocols, and City of Boca Raton (City) emergency notices. Second, the CRA needed to support the downtown business community, which was facing a catastrophic situation.
Advancing Places: Working with Media and Managing PR Campaigns
Communications is an important part of our work in urban place management. Two experienced practitioners, both downtown leaders with extensive marketing & communications backgrounds, to learn how they are building relationships with media, what the media is looking for in news stories, and how to go beyond traditional media relations to take control of your district’s story. We’ll also dive into crisis communications and some tips on planning and executing an effective PR campaign.
Advancing Places: Marketing Your Downtown as Open for Business
Every downtown and district is struggling with how to support the businesses under their purview to provide much-needed foot traffic, sales and revenues, but the fact remains that we’re all “open for business”. From ongoing campaigns targeting locals, tourists and visitors to larger 40,000-foot view strategic planning, in this session you’ll learn from two very different place management practitioners and the strategic consultancy working with both of them to deploy data and technology.
Advancing Places: Crafting Recovery Messaging
The new year has brought with it many of the same challenges, but that doesn’t mean your outward messaging needs to be doom and gloom. 2021 is bound to be complicated and exciting for districts. How do we bring positive messaging back to cities and districts that are unsure about what is next? What strategies can marketing and communications professionals use to jettison economic anxiety for business owners, residents and visitors? Where do we begin crafting year-long messaging for stakeholders operating week-by-week?
Content Strategy: Expand Your Reach Through Strategic Content Creation
Today’s marketing professionals must create their own content to reach wider audiences and gain deeper interest in their brands. This session will identify the basic components of creating a content strategy plan. Panelists will offer a variety of approaches to content creation, including sharing successes and failures. Participants will examine what content model approaches might work best for their district.
Digital Marketing During and After COVID with Geocentric
From closings and re-openings, to streeteries and social distancing guidelines, there’s never been so much information that needs to be communicated. Join Geocentric for a brief discussion of what’s working now, and how to plan for bringing people back to downtown.
Building Brand, Increasing Awareness, Celebrating Diversity: Financial District Online Interview Series
The Financial District Online Interview Series was created to leverage the diverse business and employee voices in Toronto’s Financial District to build the district’s brand, increase employee awareness of the Financial District BIA and celebrate the diversity of the area. Rather than create a new marketing/branding campaign, we used the people in the district to build the brand and speak to the strengths of the area while engaging area employees on social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn).
BID Responses for Emergency
BID’s play an important role as a liaison between the public and private sector. Downtown stakeholders rely on BID’s to ensure they receive accurate information regarding critical incidents that affect the people working and living downtown. Join this session to hear from subject matter experts about the role BIDs can play in emergency preparedness, planning, response, and recovery. Become a BID with a robust emergency plan and notification system prepared to respond and recover effectively when a disaster strikes.
Transforming Downtown Transit Streets
Great streets are the hallmark of successful cities. In cities that lack underground rail, surface street buses are the lifeblood of downtown mobility, and one or two streets can act as dedicated busways. In addition to carrying people to and through downtown, these transit streets are also important pedestrian corridors. Learn how Denver, Minneapolis, and Seattle are reinventing the way they do transit and manage their transit streets.
Sponsorships, Marketing and the Controlled Chaos of Events
This session is designed to aid districts in navigating the ins and outs of event sponsorships and marketing. Learn about knowing what types of events best suit your districts, when and what to market, as well as how to capitalize on sponsorship opportunities. Case studies include Pittsburgh’s “Picklesburg,” Wilmington’s hurricane recovery events and Hartford’s multitiered space activation.
My Bad Reputation: Overcoming a Place’s Negative Perception
They say perception is reality, but often negative perceptions about a place obscure positive changes, inhibiting growth and success. Whether the narrative is about high crime rates or inauthentic tourist traps, changing perceptions can require a multi-prong effort. Using case studies from a variety of locations, panelists will discuss how tools such as audience research, re-branding and press strategy can highlight local assets and reshape the narrative.
Craft Data-Informed Persona in Places of All Sizes
Downtown associations know their attraction and retention results are due in part to their marketing efforts. But how do you produce content that helps your downtown stand out from the rest? In this panel, downtown regions like Bozeman, MT; Los Angeles, CA; and Memphis, TN will discuss how marketing their narrative started with understanding the unique pieces of their story – namely, their data.
Building a Social Media Strategy for your Downtown
What’s your social strategy? A question we’ve all been asked, but have no simple answer. From understanding your goals and audience to maintaining your brand, come learn tools for crafting a social strategy to fit your downtown and organization.
Pop-Up Winnipeg Public Toilet
| The Pop-Up Winnipeg Public Toilet initiative aims to lead by example through providing an accessible, clean, secure, well-maintained, monitored public washroom facility. The Pop-Up has captured the imagination of people in Winnipeg and beyond, generated enthusiastic media coverage, and stirred conversations recognizing the importance of human dignity and access to public toilets in the downtown. |
NYC BID Trends Report – Telling the Story of NYC BIDs
The annual NYC BID Trends Report targets multiple audiences, serving both a promotional and educational role for the public and NYC BIDs themselves. SBS collects, analyzes, and features program output data, budget information, and highlights of exceptional programming in this report each year. The report highlights the overall impact and financial data for all BIDs and expense and output data organized by comparable BID cohorts. The report also provides financial and output data from individual BIDs.
OverFlo: Hurricane Florence Preparation, Recovery and Resilience
| Wilmington Downtown Incorporated (WDI) led a herculean effort to prepare for, and then recover from, Hurricane Florence. The process included working closely with Emergency Management personnel, property owners, and others. After executing six months of events in one month, OverFlo raised over $128,000 for six nonprofits providing food, shelter and other services for hurricane victims. |
PATH Clothing Drive: Social Media Campaign
The Toronto Financial District BIA worked with YSM to create a social media strategy to promote the PATH Clothing Drive and increase donations. It created two videos, both with a clear call to action. The BIA also compiled a list of ‘influencers’ they would reach out to on social media to share the video. In total the project resulted in 821,318 social media impressions, 450,150 video views and 6,500 bags of donated clothing: all record highs for the clothing drive.
IDA’s Urban Place Management Narrative Toolkit
For decades urban place management professionals have been waking up each day, determined to improve their cities, strategically fill vacant buildings, activate public spaces, and more. They have had great success, but, too often their work goes unnoticed by the general public. IDA’s toolkit provides a framework for communicating IDA members commitment to shaping dynamic city centers all around the world. It includes key messages and facts about the downtown management industry.
“OUR EDGE. YOUR _____.” Marketing Campaign
After the King of Prussia District celebrated their five-year mark, staff knew it would be important to reevaluate the brand of the organization and district moving forward. KOP-BID hired a local marketing and branding agency to help create a new logo, energized tagline, exciting website and playful, but focused, advertising. Through thoughtful analysis and planning, KOP-BID was able to speak directly to a newly defined target audience.
Downtown Cleveland Alliance 3-tiered Marketing Campaign
Downtown Cleveland Alliance accomplished the goal of creating economic impact for their community through a strategic and innovative three-tiered marketing campaign involving the development of print and digital advertising, the production of an annual video, and the creation of native advertising content.
Growlifornia Activation
Downtown Fresno was dealt a heavy blow when the San Francisco Giants announced they were pulling their Triple-A team from the city after 17 years. The Fresno Grizzlies and downtown Fresno decided to embrace their core traits and idiosyncrasies, celebrating the elements that made them unique, proclaiming the community a “Growlifornia Republic” a rally cry for downtown.
2017 State of Downtown Opener
The Downtown Fresno Partnership (DFP) has utilized videos to help tell the story of downtown Fresno. To date, these videos have debuted at the yearly State of Downtown event as a vehicle to show what happened throughout the year with a nod to the exciting developments on the horizon. In 2017, the decision was made to take the video back to the beginning, revisiting the formation of DFP and charting some of the highlights downtown has seen over the last six years.
Downtown Santa Monica Annual Meeting Video
After many years of hosting annual meetings, Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. (DTSM) noticed that messaging about the day-to-day management of the district was getting lost between presentations about transit and development, shiny new programs, grant funding or controversial regional and national topics. DTSM asked themselves, How do we share our passions with the world in a way that doesnt put them to sleep?
The Best of Cape Town Central City 2018 guide
The Cape Town Central City Improvement District (CCID) began to look for ways to promote the many offerings that had become integral to the Central City and, in particular, to add value to the stakeholders that had invested in the CBD in “Eat”, “Stay”, “Play” “Shop” or “Visit” destinations. To fulfill this, “The Best of Cape Town Central City” guide was created in 2009, originally published in conjunction with the internationally reknown “Time Out” brand.
Brand Overhaul
For more than 60 years, the Downtown Denver Partnership has convened, collaborated and led a bold vision to build an economically powerful center city. The Downtown Denver Partnership has had the same logo, mission statement, manifesto and key messages that had been established over a decade ago. Shifting the organization’s positioning, identity and overall communications with our audiences was going to be a challenge both internally and externally, but we knew it had to be done.
The Minneapolis Big Build
The Mpls Downtown Improvement District (DID) tracks their progress with a perception survey of downtown workers, residents, and visitors. In 2015 and 2016 surveys showed significant decreases in the perception of downtown Minneapolis cleanliness. The #1 reason was construction. Led by the DID, the team developed a POV about all the construction called “The Minneapolis Big Build.” The campaign kicked off with www.MplsBuild.com which communicated the details of the projects.
Looking Ahead Video
Downtown Seattle is experiencing record growth and investment. It seems everywhere you look there are cranes. While most DSA members and stakeholders view this development as positive, there are those who remain frustrated with the impact on mobility. To focus attention on the future instead of the inconveniences the DSA Communications & Marketing team produced a video using renderings of major projects to paint a picture of the future, allowing people to see Seattle’s skyline post-construction.
Raising BIA Awareness: #BIAweek Twitter Chat
The Toronto Association of Business Improvement Areas (TABIA) and the City of Toronto’s BIA Office worked together to declare “BIA Week” in the City of Toronto for January 29 February 2, 2018. The goal of the event was for Toronto BIAs to educate Councilors, City Staff and the public about what BIAs are and how they contribute to Toronto. This included information displays and decoration in the City Hall rotunda for the week and a reception hosted by TABIA with City Councilors and Staff.
Social Media: How to Tell the Story of a Place in Eight Seconds
There is an art and science to social media communications and marketing. Amy Blaschka, Founder and Storyteller at AmyBlaschka.com, Jason Gilbert, CEO at Saltwater Software, Ariana Gomez (former) Marketing Director at LA Fashion District BID, and Kerry Inserra, Associate Director at Walnut Creek Downtown Association share the secrets to effective communication on social media.
Scaling Up: Make Big Small Plans
This session breaks down the most effective strategies for facilitating small-scale improvements to public spaces through tactical urbanism and community engagement. Presented by Tony Garcia at Street Plans Collaborative.
User-Tailored Tracking: From Data Collection to Stakeholder Presentation
Urban district management organizations do not always have technology staff capable of in-depth analyses and database development; if they do, they might collaborate with less tech-savvy partners who are responsible for data collection and tracking. This presentation explores simple and creative methods of collecting and sharing data that can be tailored to the individual user, while holding the safety and security of sensitive data to high standards.
If You Build It, They Won’t Necessarily Come: Re-Shaping The Narrative of a Place
After years of work, your place is improving: business is good and streets are clean. But old reputations die hard, and problems remain framed a certain way. What if we want people to see places, problems and possibilities differently? Hear diverse places share how they used public space management, programming and public-private partnerships to change the narrative, and offer for discussion and commentary the perception or problem you want to change.