Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?
Art Walk in Hillsborough, NC
Smallwander.com is hosting it’s monthly teleconference this upcoming Monday, Nov 24, from 10 to 11 am. The topic is “Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?
I particularly would like to explore why Hillsborough NC’s recent “Ladies Night Out” promotion was successful. On a rainy Thursday night, hordes of women descended on the town and bought like crazy in the shops. If you have similar stories about how special events translate to dollars in the shops, please think about them beforehand and share them with us.
Panelists will include Amy Wilmoth, a freelance marketing consultant for small businesses in the Triangle area of North Carolina, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Eddie Ide, President of Newton Merchants, Inc. of Newton North Carolina, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant.
We will be inviting town representatives in our smallwander network. People will be able to either call in via telephone or listen in over the web. They can also type questions to us.
Next seminar – creating special events to stimulate downtowns
Our next smallwander.com seminar will be an open discussion about planning special seasonal events in small towns. With the holiday season approaching, many towns plan Christmas parades and home tours. How important are they for your downtown? Share your experiences with other downtown managers and tourist officers who are hoping to initiate these types of events.
Judy Wicks on Local Living Economies
I went to a talk given by Judy Wicks last night at the NC Museum of History, hosted by the Center for Environmental Farming Systems. As one member of the audience commented, Judy is a dynamo.
She is a co-founder of Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), which builds networks of locally-owned businesses within communities that promote buying from each other, respecting the environment, and paying a living wage. At home, she built the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia. Each of the networks draws on local experts representing the building blocks of a sustainable economy: food, power, health, construction, etc.
She is a living example of following her conscience. As the owner of the White Dog Cafe, she originally felt resistance to the living wage movement because she did not want to be told by others what she should pay her employees. But after looking at the faces of her trusted staff, she thought, of course she wanted to make sure they were able to cover their basic needs.
This personal connection with people and place has been an ongoing theme for her. She feels personally responsible for her restaurant’s location, which is also where she lives. She has been living on the second floor of her brownstone building in Philadelphia ever since she fought to prevent it from being torn down to make room for a mall. After a drought died up the natural areas close to home, she became conscious of how she was contributing to global warming and converted her restaurant to run on 100% renewable energy.
The White Dog Cafe is famous for being the first in the Philadelphia area to use humanely-raised cows and pigs and organic produce. In order to make that happen, she had to personally set up a network of suppliers. And, she didn’t stop there. She felt strongly enough about shifting her local economy away from factory farming, the Cafe provided capital to help the suppliers distribute the good stuff to her competitors. This grew into a non-profit, White Dog Community Enterprises, which receives 20% of their income from the for-profit restaurant.
Believe it or not, there is more. Her life and work is a great example of the benefits of carefully building local living economies. Smallwander.com believes that towns that incorporate these principles are also great places to visit, since they are living and vibrant, take care of their people and animals, have unique activities going on, and celebrate the authentic.
Buy local podcast
Leon Tongret and Greta Lint discuss how buying locally helps small towns.
More about big companies in small towns
From Blogging Stocks…
Big company, small town: Corning Inc., Corning, New York
This post is part of our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered.
Rest assured, the first decade of the 21st century is not likely to be remembered as a renaissance period in U.S. history. No one will confuse this decade with the Roaring ’20s or even the Wonderful ’90s.
Further, if the nation needs an example of rebirth and renewal — it would be hard to find a better one than the story of multinational corporation Corning (NYSE: GLW), nestled in the small town of Corning, New York.
Corning is your classic, feel-good American success story. And doesn’t the United States need a few of those today?
Moreover, Corning, arguably, represents one of the signature corporate transformation stories of the digital age.
NC STEP program training
I am presenting with Greta Lint at an NC Small Town Economic Prosperity (STEP) program training event. Greta is giving a presentation titled “Using Tourism to Stimulate Your Town’s Economy,” including a marketing 101 segment. My presentation, “Y-Web,” will touch on ways these communities can use technology to promote their towns.
The NC STEP program is sponsored by the North Carolina Rural Center to support small towns under 10,000 that are sturggling to overcome economic hardship through training, technological initiatives, and other strategies.
Why smaller is sometimes better
From Blogging Stocks
When the big company leaves the small town
This post opens our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered. Watch for more Big Company, Small Town posts coming soon.
All across this great country of ours, small cities, towns, and villages have been built in the shadows of major companies that supply work for their local populations. It can be a wonderful situation that cultivates a special kind of community and a deep-seated local pride. However, it can also be a recipe for civic disaster, if the major supplier of a wage base in a locality goes out of business or leaves town. Such was the near disastrous fate of Park Falls, Wisconsin, not so long ago.
The city of Park Falls, which is Wisconsin’s most geographically isolated city, was built around its paper mill. At its height, the mill helped to bring the population of the city to nearly 4,000 inhabitants. However, in 2006 the paper mill, which was operating at reduced capacity under ownership from out of state, was shut down almost without any prior notice. The result was immediate and deeply wrenching turmoil. Not only had the paper mill workers lost an excellent source of income, but the collateral damage was jarringly significant also. Loggers had no local market for their pulp wood. Dozens of family-feeding log trucks were idled. Private contractors who did various types of work for the mill were left with thousands of dollars worth of unpaid invoices. Local vendors, retailers, and support businesses almost immediately went slack.