How cool is your region? You're about to find out ...
By Tayla Scott
They say confidence is key. So confidence in our region must be paramount to its success.
The Lower Columbia Initiatives Corporation is trying to increase just that. The corporation just began a four-month campaign which includes the release of a metric, or fact, in the first week of every month, in the hopes of keeping the public informed and confident in our region.
“We wanted to be able to have some really good, interesting facts about our region that we could forward on to our visitors. Not just every-day facts, but some things that are surprisingly new or different that people haven’t heard or been aware of before,” said Terry Van Horn, Economic Development Co-ordinator for the Lower Columbia Initiative.
The Lower Columbia region includes Trail, Rossland, Warfield, Montrose, Fruitvale, and Electoral Areas A and B.
“Every month we’re going to release a new, interesting tidbit piece of information that we’re hoping people will be able to share and spread the good news around the community,” said Van Horn.
The first metric was released in the first week of July. It said that from January to June this year, $ 9.4 million has been invested in building permits in the region.
“That’s a pretty big number for our region. It’s an exciting number to know that people feel strong about our region; that they’re investing in our region,” said Van Horn.
“We have various different ways we want to get the information out. We have it, of course on our website and you can actually embed it into your own website with a little piece of code,” said Van Horn. “Contact the LCIC office [for this].”
“Also we are doing a paper and ad print campaign as well as a billboard on the bottom of the hill of Annabelle going up towards Rossland, to kind of attract from the border traffic,” said Van Horn.
“We also have created [the metrics] in jpg format, which is like a picture format, as well as pdf format so people can embed them in their newsletters,” said Van Horn.
“It’s free for everybody to use the metric.”
An image will be used along with the fact to help people recognize the monthly metric.
“We’d like to keep the same thriving community image and you’ll see that it’s got a nice skyline of our region with the mountain and Teck and then the water,” said Van Horn.
“This is part of a larger campaign that the LCIC is starting to implement. It’s about creating ambassadors for our region and having some good news stories or some economic development metric showcasing how our economies are thriving and how healthy we are as a region,” said Van Horn. “And hopefully to be able to have our residents be ambassadors and forward that message and forward that information on to visitors that are coming into our region.”
“It’s all about attracting or retaining people in our region and 70 per cent of people that we attract from outside of the region, actually visit here first.”
“We want to be able to have people be able to repeat that metric and share that information. That’s really what our goal is and that’s how we want people to participate,” said Van Horn.
After the four-month campaign ends, the metric is planned to be a monthly occurrence. The theme will centre around all different forms of economic development.
“I just want to make sure that people recognize that this is a positive initiative and that we are working really hard in our communities to be collaborative amongst all the communities,” said Van Horn. “And having these metrics be a positive influence and have people be proud to be able to share that information.”
