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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2024-06-24 - Minutes -Fayetteville Advertising and Promotion Commission Minutes June 24, 2024 Fayetteville Town Center Commissioners Present: Commissioners Absent: Staff: Chrissy Sanderson, Chair, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Elvis Moya, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Mike Wiederkehr, City Council Representative Andrew Prysby, Commissioner at-large Sarah Bunch, City Council Representative Katherine Kinney, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Todd Martin, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Molly Rawn, CEO Jennifer Walker, VP of Finance, I. Chair Sanderson called the meeting to order at 2:00 pm and declared a quorum. II. Old Business A. Chair Sanderson presented the May minutes for approval with Commissioner Wiederkehr making a motion and Commissioner Moya seconded to approve the minutes as presented. III. New Business A. CEO Report Rawn began by sharing that our HMR tax is rebounding, we are beginning to close the gap in between our projected and actual HMR revenue. She shared that the new online payment system the city made mandatory in April has caused a delay in some payments being made as users are becoming familiar with the system. She pointed out that last month we reported a significant decrease in April collections, this month she was able to show how April collections has improved greatly as users are making back payments. Our 2023 financial audit is complete, and commissioners have received the report. We will be hearing a report later in the meeting. Hotel occupancy is flat, which is an improvement over last month’s report. The Visitors Center saw a 46% increase in attendance in May compared to last year. Our May 2024 hotel occupancy compared to May 2023 shows an 8% increase while our YTD hotel occupancy shows an almost flat or .2% growth. In sales, Tina traveled to an international show, IPW with a cooperative opportunity with Arkansas Tourism. The team took on over 90 appointments. The Ragnar Relay has secured dates for 2025 race. It will be held Easter weekend. Tina continues to represent us with motorcycle events, recently taking Vanny to the Over and Out MOTO event in Mansfield, MO. Julie, Eden and Molly surprised 15 hospitality professionals with “Hospitality Hero” certificates in May during National Tourism week. Our very own Chair, Chrissy Sanderson, was also included in these awards. We had 467 events in May on our web calendar. Our website sessions were down 4% from April 2023, but up 83% compared to May 2023. The Fayetteville Strawberry Festival and NWA Pride events both made the top 10 most viewed pages. Our primary email list has climbed to 10,321 subscribers. Our YOY social media engagement rates are up by 3 times with overall followers growing by 746 accounts. Our new downtown tear off map is now available and includes an expanded footprint of downtown and expanded list of attractions and restaurants/bars. We also have more collateral that will receive an update this year, including a redesigned street map, bucket list and a new bikepacking guide. Since our last meeting, the town center has hosted 12 events. This schedule is lighter than usual due to the ongoing roof replacement. We’ve used this time for deep cleaning and other maintenance items. Our solar panel project planning has begun. An update on Downtown Fayetteville Coalition – we had a successful inaugural strawberry festival with an estimated 10,000 in attendance. Lights of the Ozarks will be two separate events this year – the lighting night will be held the Friday before Thanksgiving as is tradition. The parade will be held the first Thursday of December. We had a successful June First Thursday. May’s First Thursday was cancelled due to a high chance of thunderstorms – which ended up being mostly clear. Moving forward we will not make weather calls until the day of the event. Commissioner Moya asked if we would be communicating the Lights of the Ozarks change to the media and Sarah King said that yes, we were already updating sites and connecting with the tourism team at the state about this change. B. Financial Report VP Walker stated that the May financials were in the agenda packets. The target budget for both expenses and revenue for May is 42%. With total revenue YTD at $2,358,001 we are 3% below budget. We are also at 39% for expenses. Total expenses are $1,881,570 or 30%, we are 3% under budget. YTD HMR tax collections are $1,960,338 which is 5% below the seasonally adjusted target. We have seen increases in the number of businesses utilizing the online payment system and we think this will only continue to improve, i.e. at the time of reporting, approximately 18% of businesses had not yet reported monthly HMR revenue, which is an improvement of the previous month at 30%. The balance sheet for April shows $4.8 million dollars in cash and investments and the unearned revenue for the town center is $318,000 for 2024 events. Our net income is $14, 204 YTD, the first time this year that number has been a net gain and not a loss. C. 2023 Financial Audit Presentation Cynthia Burns and Abby Smith with Forvis Mazars opened the presentation by saying the audit report went very well and they were able to issue the audit report by the end of May. As usual, because we are doing a regulatory basis of accounting, we receive an adverse opinion on generally accepted accounting principles, but we received an unmodified opinion on regulatory basis of accounting, which is the best opinion we can receive on the financial statements. The opinion is also an unmodified opinion concerning the testing and the work we did, we noticed no significant deficiencies or material weaknesses in both the A&P financials and operations. You ended the year with approximately a 500,000 increase in our fund balance, a very good year for the commission. The other document in the report, aside from the financial statements is the required communications to the governing board, including standard language for audits. The only adjustment on the books, one made all the time, is the adjustment of the commission’s investments to agree with the city of Fayetteville’s records, which is an adjustment that comes every year. The only other item we noted was a one-time instance where the accounting software didn’t automatically back up. Cynthia Burns shared that they appreciated all the hard work the staff did in preparing for the audit, it went very smoothly. Cynthia also addressed a question from Commissioner Wiederkehr concerning regulatory accounting. With no other questions, she again thanked the staff and the commission and urged anyone to reach out to her with any other questions. D. Marketing Report Sarah King began by reminding commissioners that Outright came on board in January as our new agency of record. They were able to do a photo and video shoot in March. She introduced Anne Davis, Director of Marketing with Outright who gave an overview of the marketing campaign that they began in April along with some preliminary reporting. Davis talked about the campaign, built on the themes of outdoor recreation, food and drink and nightlife/arts and culture. Target geo areas Chicago/ DFW, Denver and also road trippers, i.e. within a 4-hour distance. This campaign will run through December with the heavy investment being now through September, knowing that it can be a 90-day lead time between when someone sees an ad and they actually travel to that area. Davis then reviewed some high-level statics from the first 6 weeks of the ads, showing that there were just over 12 million impressions of the ads and almost 60,000 clicks from the ads with a higher than average click through rate and a high video completion rate. Commissioner Prysby had questions and comments about optimizing the cost to reach our target audience and Davis said she could share some information about that. Davis also shared organic traffic increases compared to 2023. They are also working with the Pixel Perfect team to continue to make some modifications and improvements to our website. She ended with sharing a new video link that will debut this week. Also, we have begun doing some advertisements in the Arkansas Times. Davis passed it to Stephanie, the media relations manager with Outright. Starting in February, they began sending two story ideas a month to relevant publications and also set up introductory conversations with relevant travel journalists. We’ve had consistently been in 15 articles a month, some are just mentions and some are features. We had an outdoor freelance journalist in Fayetteville during the eclipse and those articles are starting to appear. We’ll be featured in Southern Living in October, and we also had a recent article in the Knot about where to host your wedding in Fayetteville. She ended with asking if anyone had questions or story ideas to feel free to send them to Outright. Commissioner Moya asked if the links where we are mentioned could be sent to the commission so they could also share them out and review them. Molly and Sarah said they would do discuss a good way to do that. The new video was shown with good reactions. E. Vote. Scissor Lifts purchase at Fayetteville Town Center. Rawn opened up with background that we currently owned one scissor lift that is beyond it’s usable life and one we rent. Our intent was to replace the lift we owned and in seeking quotes, we realized we could purchase two scissor lifts for the same cost as we planned to purchase one, thus relieving our need to rent one. The expense would be $33,022.50 and was included in our original budget and also the revised budget. We asked for a contingency of. Chair Sanderson asked if the scissor lifts were new and asked about maintenance. Commissioner Bunch also asked questions. With no other questions, Chair Sanderson asked for a motion to authorize the CEO to accept a quote for two new scissor lifts from Hugg & Hall and spend up to $36,300, which is the quoted price with a 10% contingency for unforeseen costs. The motion was made by Commissioner Moya and seconded by Commissioner Bunch and was approved unanimously by a roll call vote. F. As a closing note, Rawn added that the town center is once again hosting Youth Zone this coming Saturday as a part of NWA Equality Pride Weekend. The parade will be held Saturday afternoon at 5pm. With no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 2:55pm. Minutes submitted by Amy Stockton, Director of Operations, Experience Fayetteville