Courtesy / Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce
Belfast is home to a historic downtown and a strong arts community.
April 23, 2019
Cross-group collaboration to leverage Belfast’s economic potential
Courtesy / Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce
Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce, Belfast Creative Coalition and Our Town Belfast are forging new collaborations to strategically promote the city.
New collaborations between the Belfast Area Chamber of Commerce, Belfast Creative Coalition and Our Town Belfast are being forged in order to leverage promotion and marketing resources for the city as a whole.
“We’ve looked at opportunities to cross promote and maximize what it is each of us is already doing,” Our Town Belfast Executive Director Zach Schmesser told the city council at its April 16 meeting.
Schmesser said the three groups are examining how to both differentiate themselves and also work together to maximize returns for the city. One example of collaboration occurred this past February, he said. The chamber changed the scheduling of its annual Belfast Winter Whoopla festival to coincide with Our Town Belfast’s downtown cabin fever sale.
“The goal was to maximize marketing and bulk up the weekend, so there were activities throughout the weekend,” Schmesser said. “We collaboratively looked at what’s best and how to leverage resources for promotion and marketing.”
Steve Ryan, the chamber’s executive director, said new planning initiatives toward further collaboration include mapping out the strengths of each organization and focusing on how they can collectively support business and economic development across Waldo County in addition to the city of Belfast.
“These refinements in our ability to map out where our strengths are, where our different constituencies are and where our funding comes from is helping us to overlap less and also to start to map out things we can do together, that we probably never would have aspired to do individually,” said Ryan.
Coherent message
Coordinating activities and marketing efforts, in order to speak with a coherent message, is a top priority, Ryan said.
“We’re all talking about Belfast to both people here and away,” Ryan said. “It’s more powerful, coherent and effective if we’re all talking about the same general qualities of Belfast and the reasons to work and live here and the reasons to visit. Coordinating that will be more powerful than each doing our own thing.”
In addition, Ryan said, the three organizations plan to coordinate their online presence. “One tangible way to do this is to have single landing page,” he said. “That would be a single place where a tourist, a local, a business, anybody who’s interested in the city of Belfast could find all the links and resources.”
The single landing page wouldn’t have to be limited to the three organizations, he noted.
“This type of collaboration can be powerful,” said Ryan. “This is what we’re trying to move toward and combine our heft to achieve.”
Another initiative, still in its infancy, is to collaborate with event-holders across the city and across the spectrum of organizations to make the city event calendar more robust, and also more spread out to address the shoulder seasons, Ryan said.
Larraine Brown, director of Belfast Creative Coalition, noted her organization has embarked on developing an arts and cultural plan for Waldo County, aimed at documenting an inclusive study to find new methods to increase the reach, value and relevance of cultural offerings. The process includes a cultural survey that is currently underway and available through the organization’s website. Input is expected to help the organization build a data-driven plan that will better connect the community to the arts, cultural and heritage assets.
The council was positive in its response to the presentation.
“Having three strong groups working together, however you do it, makes your groups individually stronger and us all stronger in terms of presence and positive energy,” said Councilor Eric Sanders.
“We’re very aware that the large employers and the visible successes are not the only businesses, organizations and , individuals in Belfast,” observed Ryan. “We’re trying to create an infrastructure that supports small business, support communities broadly and integrates the arts with economic development.”
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