Urality

Thursday and Friday, we were in Flagler Beach Florida for the first in hopefully many Downtown Playbook campaigns. The team in Flagler was great to work with, and we look forward to their participation moving forward! #downtownplaybook #communitydevelopment #communityengagement #civicengagement

It's Friday, which means all of those #mainstreet challenges we've been talking about this week are mentioned here, along with opportunities to solve each one. We hope you put some of these ideas to work on your own Main Streets and business districts! #mainstreet #districtmanagement #communitydevelopment #propertymanagement #economicdevelopment

Today, we shift our series about Main Street Challenges from the Properties to the Businesses. Is your organization the last to know when a business is moving into town? Or the last to know when they are closing? What are the barriers to getting new businesses to move into your district? Why aren't your businesses open on certain weekdays, making your downtown a ghost town? 👻 If you've been following along this week, we've talked about the challenges. Tomorrow, we'll have a longer post discussing some potential solutions, so be sure to check that out! #mainstreet #businessdevelopment #districtmanagement

Yesterday in our Main Street Challenges series, we talked about property owners. Today, we're going to talk about the properties! When was the last time you did an inventory of your downtown's or district's property? Do you know what condition your vacancies are in? Do you know what the property is fit out to provide (ie does it have a kitchen? Set up for medical practice?) Do you have a history of tenants and turnover within the building? Does the building contain multiple businesses, and do you have a footprint of each documented? Does the building have a historical status, and does that restrict its use? We could keep going here, but when you're a point person in your downtown or district, providing this data shouldn't be a chore. Chances are you have one or more locals who own properties in your downtown. Working with them informed with current data can build trust in your organization! We'll talk more about the steps you can take on Friday, but for now, think about your own property challenges and share them here! #mainstreet #realestate #commercialdevelopment #propertyowners #propertymanagement

It's Tuesday, so we're on part two of a five part series on the challenges that Main Street directors face in their daily work. Part 2 is about property owners. If your downtown has properties, you have property owners! What's your relationship with them? Do they live in your town? Are they hard to track down? How do you share information with them? We hear from Main Streets often that their relationship with the owners of local property is strained: Absent, non-committal, or at worst combative towards your causes as a Main Street org. Whether you have a property owner that is fully invested in your vision of your downtown, or one that's using their storefront as storage, your goal is to build a better relationship with them. What kind of information could you give property owners to build a better relationship? We have some ideas we're working on (stay tuned for Friday) but we want to hear from you as well. #mainstreet #knowledgebase #propertyownership

Today we start a five part series on the challenges that Main Street directors face in their daily work. For future reference, if you see an image of someone with a headache the rest of the week, be sure to stop and read! We'd also love to hear from you about your own challenges! Part 1 is about information. Information is everywhere. You want it from people, and people want it from you. When someone in the community asks you a question, how do you find the answer? A spreadsheet? An email? Connecting them with another person? All of the above? Time consuming, right? When do you get the time to do the work you're actually hired to do? As a main street director, you already serve a role that includes many different hats, and you shouldn't be expected to be the town database as well. How about getting information? How do you maintain your relationships with local businesses and property owners? If you have to recall a conversation from six months ago, how hard is it to find the information you're looking for? We won't be answering these questions today. We'll follow up on Friday with opportunities to level up your current methods for gathering and sharing information. #mainstreet #knowledgebase #dropsomeknowledge

We're in the @urality lab this month working on something new!

🚀 LAUNCH ALERT 🚀

We're excited to partner with Heritage Ohio to pilot Unified with three Ohio Main Street Programs (Lorain, Elyria, Wellington) to prove the power of data collection at scale. For two years, Main Street managers will collect data using Unified to streamline and acquire as complete of a dataset as possible for the business community and beyond. Results from their data collection will be automatically aggregated to the state level to look for new challenges and opportunities to benefit the programs. We look forward to working with everyone involved! A big thanks to NORD FAMILY FOUNDATION for their generous grant to make this possible! #mainstreet #economicdevelopment #datacollection #districtmanagement

One of our goals here is to stop duplicating data where possible. Here’s an example of that: Montclair Center is hosting their Art Walk for 2024 this week. Local businesses are paired with one or more artists to showcase their work, along with talks, live mural paintings, and more. For this event, we used our out of the box solution to - find out which businesses want to participate - take artist submissions - link artists to businesses - build the schedule of programming for the day - promote the event with a single page, including a map and venues, artists bios, and a schedule. The team saved on data entry by raising their business data which was already available in the system. After the event, they will be able to start a new contact list for artists that they can use for future events! We’re happy with how this worked out for theout BID, and is really an example of how community based programming can be maximized, while saving time by reusing data. Also, here’s the nearly finished product! https://lnkd.in/exijZRny