The URL can be used to link to this page

Home My WebLink About2024-09-23 - Minutes -Fayetteville Advertising and Promotion Commission Minutes September 23, 2024 Fayetteville Town Center Commissioners Present: Commissioners Absent: Staff: Chrissy Sanderson, Chair, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Elvis Moya, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Sarah Bunch, City Council Representative (virtual) Andrew Prysby, Commissioner at-large Katherine Kinney, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Todd Martin, Tourism & Hospitality Representative Mike Wiederkehr, City Council 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 August minutes for approval. Commissioner Prysby noted he was present at the August meeting, not absent. This will be corrected before the minutes are submitted to the City Clerk’s office. With no other changes being made, the minutes stood approved with that correction. III. New Business A. CEO Report We worked with Ellingson Construction to put up a wall in the Visitors Center which is allowing us to remain open except for certain times when construction will be too cumbersome to be open. You can except us to be open Wednesday- Saturday. Destination Master Plan is underway and Commissioner Moya is the commission’s representative for this project. We hope to host the HMR task force’s first meeting next week. Also, we are in conversation with the city about the city collection contract and plan to work with them. Rawn then praised Dell Hall on our EF Sales team, stating he met with many meeting planners at a recent conference to garner 3 different RFPs which is resulting in one site visit already this year. She also spoke about a new print piece we will be sharing, a single panel for Fayetteville Art Gallery coalition. We will be helping them promote different gallery tours throughout the year. We are kicking off Hoptoberfest, which is an event featuring a limited edition t-shirt for the first 50 who complete the 8 Fayetteville breweries. We have hired an architecture to help us at FTC to help suggest some improvements to the building’s facade such as the teal paint color on the rails, an awning that is not functional etc. The town center has hosted 16 events since we last met. We are in the final stages of restoration of the Walker Stone House second floor porch and it should be complete this week, weather permitting. Downtown Fayetteville Coalition has launched a façade program – a matching grant of up to $2,500 to help downtown businesses with small exterior improvements to signage, awning and more. Rawn also included upcoming events such as upcoming razorback football games and she also spoke about upcoming A&P commission meeting dates. We will not meet in November but will meet on December 9th to review and approve the 2025 budget and possibly see an update from Coraggio Group concerning our Master Tourism Plan. Commissioner Moya asked about Light Night for Lights of the Ozarks, and which entity was coordinating that event. Rawn said it will be an Experience Fayetteville event with Sarah King handling communications. The parade on December 5th will be handled more by Downtown Fayetteville Coalition. B. Financial Report August financials statements are in your packets along with a balance sheet. The target for both revenue and expenditures is 67%. Revenue at 64% with expenditures at 61% and HMR tax collections are YTD at $3,317,425. Net operating income is $173,714 YTD and cash and investments are $4.8 million on the balance sheet. Walker pointed out that the town center has approximately $240,000 left in unearned revenue for events booked the remainder of 2024. C. Marketing Report Sarah King introduced Anne Davis with Outright to share an overview of performance through August. Through August our paid campaign has reached more than 18.6 million impressions, about 5 million more than we planned. This allows our budget to go farther than we projected. Davis continued with stating that high level trending data shows that the average length of stay has increased by 22% compared to 2023 from 1 night average to 1.2 nights average and also our overall share of overnight stays has increased from 47% to 51% of trips. Davis can also say that we can see where people are coming from via the Arrivalist data. You can see that Chicago has grown 150% with Dallas growing 138% and we see that Denver has grown 10%. Spotlights on some exciting things that are happening, on the advertising side we added “retargeting” which is where we are reaching users who visited the EF website or saw an ad. We are planning an email newsletter campaign with Axios Chicago and Axios Denver running in late September to October. This is a newer media platform for Experience Fayetteville to participate in and we are excited to see the results from these areas. In the beginning of August we updated our display ads to show upcoming Fall foliage – and also showing specifically the Denver and Chicago area that you can bike, eat on a patio etc throughout the rest of the year. In earned media, we hosted a media event in Golden Colorado in September for journalists to join Sarah, Ashley and Brannon Pack with Ozark Foundation and Stephanie Levinson with Outright. We are continuing the conversation with the journalists and hoping to host two journalists travel to Fayetteville later this fall. This proactive approach is something we hope to replicate next year, maybe with a different city. Davis asked Sarah King asked about the Bikepacking Guide to see if it was printed yet and Sarah said the guide was at the press as we speak. Anne spoke about some of the earned media coverage we have earned such as Velo and Outside. She also said we were featured in the New York Times and also Southern Living. Landing this coverage in these well respected magazines is something to be proud of. Commissioner Prysby commented about the direct flight from XNA to Detroit and wondered about how we want to showcase ourselves in places like Detroit. He commented on how we need to look at our strategies when XNA onboards direct flights like Detroit and Philadelphia. With the report concluded, both Davis and King were thanked and appreciated for the great media effort and results. D. Vote. TekTrendz Contract Renewal. We are concluding two years with TekTrendz and it is time to renew a contract. We propose to renew with TekTrendz for a three year contract which would take us through October 2027. At that time we would plan to extend a RFP as it will have been 5 years with one vendor. The proposal is for 36 months for a total of $135,944 with a yearly impact less than our current budget line item due to renewing for three years as opposed to two years. Chair Sanderson asked for questions and hearing none, asked for a motion. Commissioner Bunch made a motion which was seconded by Commissioner Kinney to authorize the CEO to approve the three year contract with TekTrendz to serve as our Managed IT service provider for a total price of $135,944. It was unanimously approved. With no more business or announcements, the meeting was adjourned at 2:45pm. Minutes submitted by Amy Stockton, Director of Operations, Experience Fayetteville