Calendar
It seems every tourism and community discussion revolve around a community calendar. The discussion is twofold, one centered around amenities and one centered around visitors.
For amenities, the goal of the calendar is to make sure there isn’t overlap. That doesn’t mean no events at the same time or same day, but rather, if there are ways to complement each other, then let’s find a way to do so. For example, Legends had a great turnout for a band after the Bacon n Brew Fest.
Another approach has been making sure our attractions schedule a toddler event on different days so a parent can have something to do everyday. There is also the desire to schedule things on back to back days to elongate weekends. Then sometimes, there is just the plain fact that there will be a double booking. And often times that is fine as well if the events last multiple hours.
Then for residents and visitors, they need to be able to access a calendar with all the events. For this calendar, here are some tips to get your event out there. First and foremost, make sure you create a Facebook event. Then make sure you upload the event to Grow Clinton’s calendar and Clinton Herald’s calendar as when you google “events Clinton, Iowa,” we are one and two. Don’t forget to upload tourist events to Travel Iowa’s calendar as well. This provides further amplification for your event. There are multiple other online calendars as well that if you have the time don’t hurt. As it all helps creates a digital footprint of your event.
Make sure you are uploading to the Clinton Herald and sending in press releases or flyers to them as from these inputs, the Herald is creating their calendar and community event section in the paper.
This leads to a conversation about how to centralize a community event calendar that we can use for tourism and marketing and community awareness. As the reality is it takes time to upload events to all these calendars. Stay tuned for that but know a big focus on 2024-2025 will be this community calendar and how it works.
Passports
Visit Clinton has three passports out that visitors and locals can access here: https://www.growclinton.com/visiting/discover-clinton-plan-your-trip/. These passports are the River Cities Art Trail, the River Cities Summer Fun Pass, and the Bites N Brews. Simply signup on our website and your phone keeps track of the places you check in at. As you build check in, you can win prizes as you visit more places. Also, check out the passport for special deals. It’s a great way to visit a town as it’s a virtual tour guide on your phone. And the beauty is no app is required!
Marketing
We have a few awesome publications coming up in the near future. We will have a spread in The Iowan. We are continuing our monthly segment on Living Local. We are building out hunting/fishing ads for publications. We just applied for a Iowa Tourism Grant to do our first full digital campaign focused on retargeting virtual eyeballs to Clinton. Meaning if someone in Chicago or Milwaukee googled the River, Dubuque, Davenport or even visited, we will hit them with a Visit Clinton ad.
This is tourism in a nutshell. I will be a tourist here next week as I go hike into Havasu Falls and hopefully hike out.