Prior to Covid, the Downtown Alliance launched the Explorer in Chief contest, calling for one-minute video submissions for the ultimate summer dream job. For the Explorer in Chief, this would be a life-changing opportunity to work as a travel ambassador in one of the world’s high-profile tourism destinations. For the Downtown Alliance, it would be a game-changing way to showcase Lower Manhattan as an extraordinary place to visit, work and live.
Online Visibility
Sub Categories: Online Visibility
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.
Get Your District Back Online with Digital Advertising
There’s never been a greater need to quickly bring our districts back on track. Digital advertising is the most efficient channel for increasing foot traffic, event attendance and sales, but only when it’s done right. Learn how Downtown Norfolk used digital ads during the pandemic to become the country’s top travel destination, shattered Restaurant Week records and emerged with extraordinary momentum.
Advancing Places: Get Your District Back Online With Digital Advertising
There’s never been more need to quickly bring our districts back on track. Digital advertising is the most efficient channel for increasing foot traffic, event attendance, and sales… but only when it’s done right. Learn how Downtown Norfolk used digital ads during the pandemic to become the country’s top travel destination, shattered Restaurant Week records, and emerged with extraordinary momentum.
Virtual First Friday
Downtown Ventures’ Virtual First Friday promotion boosted community support for creative-sector retailers affected by COVID-19 closures. When Downtown Colorado Springs’ monthly gallery hop was canceled, Virtual First Friday bridged the patronage gap, pushing online sales as well as social media attention.
Advancing Places: The Virtual Public Realm
In a hybrid era of virtual and physical, how can urban place management organizations showcase their assets and developments? Learn how the Downtown Center BID (DCBID) in Los Angeles developed a virtual tour platform to showcase the downtown real estate market, its most significant properties, public spaces, and development projects, to investors, developers, brokers, prospective commercial and residential tenants.
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.
“Getting the Word Out:” Strategically Sound District Communications
In a world of packed calendars, dizzying social feeds and overflowing email inboxes—on top a global pandemic, no less—how can districts successfully deliver messaging, reach their target audiences and negotiate the needs of stakeholders who want district support in “getting the word out?” Speakers from communities large and small, share hands-on, proven tactics of how to strategically marry audience, channel and results.
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.
Why So Serious? Follow the Fun to Find Your Voice
Could you pick your marketing voice out in a crowd, or do you sound like every other BID in your city? From newsletters, to signage, website copy and annual meeting videos, stop taking yourself so seriously and start having fun! Using both case studies and the basic tenets of improv comedy, BID communications experts will help make the mundane memorable.
Join Grow with Google to Empower Your Community with Digital Skills (Grow with Google)
You’re already doing great work in your community and Grow with Google wants to help. Grow with Google helps people across the United States gain digital skills to grow their careers and businesses. Join us to learn how you can gain access to presentation materials, resources and hands-on help from Grow with Google’s team, all completely free of cost.
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.
Downtown Tempe’s Micro-Influencer Program
People assume that to be influential on social media you must have thousands and thousands of followers. However, marketers have discovered that the true effectiveness of influencer marketing comes from engagement. In 2017, the Downtown Tempe Authority alongside Bright Brothers Strategy Group, launched a micro-influencer pilot program in an effort to increase authentic engagement and ramp up BID marketing efforts across the board.
LCI Tech: Digital Accessibility Toolkit
This Digital Accessibility Toolkit outlines how you can design your digital content to be more friendly to individuals with disabilities. Focusing on the types of content and web pages place management organizations produce, this toolkit suggests dozens of easily implementable best practices that will greatly improve the legibility of your content. Find resources to address accessibility challenges with images, multimedia, web forms, social media and more.
Strengthen Your BID Through Branding
How do you brand something as complex as a city? Two BIDs talk through how their successful rebrands not only modernized and unified their identities, amplified the effectiveness of all of the organization’s endeavors, increased the recognition the BIDs got from stakeholders, and saved time and money – but also accomplished something larger. Rebranding positioned both BIDs to move from identifying their communities as a “place” to representing a “destination” – answering the questions “Why visit here?” “Why live here?” and “Why invest here?” No matter the size of your BID, these branding insights will make your work more effective.
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.
DowntownDC’s District of Fashion Runway Show
The District of Fashion runway show seeks to align DC with industry-standard practices in fashion and highlight the unique talent located in the DC area. The project is designed to elevate and support the local retail and fashion industry. With high retail space prices and tepid support for the industry, this event sought to give the fashion and shopping retail industry a needed boost both for the perception of the industry and for consumers who spend money at brick and mortar retailers in DowntownDC.
Atlanta Downtown: CAP/ADID’s New Look
After years of feeling dissatisfied with a challenging and uninspiring organizational logo, paired with a need to redesign an aging website, Central Atlanta Progress and the Atlanta Downtown Improvement District (CAP/ADID) made the decision to undergo a comprehensive rebranding process. It created a unifying master brand, Atlanta Downtown (ATL DTN, for short), under which CAP and ADID fall, allowing for a consumer-facing identity and two visually consistent logos that represent CAP and ADID.
Welcome to Capitol Hill Placemaking Video
With recent developments in our BID boundaries, we decided that it was time to consider filming a new placemaking video that reflects the urban renaissance of Capitol Hill. We collaborated with a professional videographer, our Board of Directors, stakeholders, local businesses and constituents to produce a placemaking video that would help create a sense of place and set the tone for the message we want to convey to our audience, which is that Capitol Hill has something for everyone.
“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.
Engage and Grow Your Audience with Digital Marketing
The customer journey has transitioned to a mobile first, content driven, digital ecosystem. In this new digital landscape, it can be daunting to plan, execute, maintain and evaluate a digital marketing plan. This session brings together best practices to identify and engage your audience, amplify your reach, bring visibility to your businesses and drive foot traffic to your district. Learn simple tactics that can be implemented right away, even if youre digitally challenged.
2017 Grand Illumination Parade – Facebook Live and TV Broadcast
The Downtown Norfolk Council (DNC) has produced the Grand Illumination Parade – the premier holiday parade in the region and a Southeast Tourism Top 20 Event – since 1985. Beginning in 1989, we broadcast the parade live in prime time on broadcast television as a way to further distinguish our parade as the region’s best. In 2016, with a tight budget, and changes in the way people are consuming media, we realized it was time to evaluate the current parade broadcast program and our objectives.
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.
Engaging Millennials and Shoppers in the Digital Age
Millennials have built a reputation as the digital generation and although convenience and price are critical to keeping these customers, their spending patterns and lifestyle preferences suggest they also place value on personalized experiences and brand authenticity, both, in-store and online. This session brings together experts in the field of downtown marketing, website development, and Facebook marketing science to share best practice on successful downtown and small business marketing.
Become a Local Partner with Google
The mission of Google’s Get Your Business Online program is to help every business be found by every customer looking for them online. Learn how you can partner with Google to help the small businesses you work with in your community, using resources, trainings, gear and one-on-one help from the Google team, all completely free of cost.