News from The Globe and Mail

Small towns boast innovative strategies

Monday, May 19, 2003

There are many pairs of eyes in Mount Pearl, Nfld., scouting out sites for Elizabeth Jones to buy.

Her home-care business, Serenity Nursing and Home Support Services Ltd., has outgrown its rented quarters. So among the people keeping an eye out for property on her behalf are the economic development staff employed by this city of 26,000 adjacent to St. John's.

Ms. Jones launched her business in 1996 from her spare bedroom, quickly moved to rented quarters and now employs 100 nurses, nursing assistants and personal-care attendants to care for elderly and disabled people in their own homes.

"We're looking to purchase space and these people [city officials] are going out and looking for me. They're very pro small business," she says.

Mount Pearl is one of many smaller Canadian communities that are successfully developing and promoting strategies to woo new businesses and expand existing ones. The city won awards last year for both its strong support of home-based businesses and for a marketing campaign promoting the community that wowed judges from the Economic Developer's Association of Canada.

In Ontario, the City of Guelph and the Township of Centre Wellington to the north, which includes the towns of Fergus and Elora, joined forces last summer to develop an award-winning two-day "Gardens, Grapes and the Grand" tour package that visits attractions in all of the participating municipalities. The promotion, being marketed to tour bus companies, costs $110 a person and takes in a guided garden tour of the Guelph arboretum located on the University of Guelph campus; an overnight stay with dinner and breakfast at the Ramada Hotel and Conference Centre in Guelph; shopping in Elora's historical downtown core along the Grand River, and a winery tour and tasting at Cox Creek Cellars, a specialty fruit winery in Fergus.

"The intriguing part of it was looking at communities partnering together" to provide a packaged program of very different experiences, says Deb Dalziel, general manager of the Centre Wellington Chamber of Commerce, based in Fergus.

The tour marketing brochure, which cost each of the collaborating agencies only $300 to produce, plus use of their proprietary mailing lists for promotional purposes, won a marketing award last year from EDAC.

"Packages and one-stop shops are integral to a user-friendly market," she says. Travellers are looking for experiences and, thanks to the Web, they know what's available. "So we created this with that in mind," Ms. Dalziel says.

The City of Airdrie, Alta., (pop. 22,000) opted to use a CD-ROM format for its marketing campaign because the community promotes itself as being "technology friendly so we felt we had to use the technology," says Maggie Armstrong, the city's co-ordinator of economic development.

The CD, honoured for innovative use of technology for marketing purposes by EDAC last year, highlights the top 10 reasons a business person would want to set up shop in Airdrie and provides links to the city's Web site, economic development support programs and a video profile of the community. It also promotes the city's small-town, family-oriented lifestyle.

Although the city's development plans focus on attracting technology-based firms, its location on the main highway between Calgary and Edmonton and its proximity to airport and rail facilities mean "we really are a transportation hub, so we also look at transportation warehouse logistics type companies."