Primer on the Utah Office of Tourism, its Programs, and the Resources the Office Provides
Hi everyone, on behalf of the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, or IORT at Utah State University, we welcome you to the sixth of nine sessions of the Red Emerald Resilience Training Program. I'm Danya Rumore, the director of The Wallace Stegner Center's Environmental Dispute Resolution Program at the University of Utah. I'm an IORT partner, and I will be facilitating today's session. To start us off, we want to highlight that this training series is supported by the Utah Office of Tourism's Destination Development and Partner Relations team.
We also want to give you a little background for the Red Emerald Resilience Training series. As many of you may know, probably all too well, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in serious economic setbacks and challenges for the tourism industry and many destination communities throughout Utah and across the nation many businesses and tourism organizations are still recovering from or learning how to adapt in this post-pandemic world. To address this need, the Utah Office of Tourism and IORT came together to build this webinar training series with the purpose of helping Utah's tourism industry and local businesses recover from COVID-19 and become more resilient to future shocks. We consulted with industry leaders and business owners throughout
the state via interviews and a survey, and we use what we heard to to inform the creation of this series. The topics and design of the training sessions reflect what we heard was most important. Our ultimate hope in conducting this training series is that through sharing best practices, strategies, Lessons Learned and success stories, we can help Utah's tourism industry and businesses thrive in an ever-changing world. For the full training program you can see our website. I'm going to post that into the chat for everyone so you'll have a link to the website,
so check that out if you want to learn more. This training series is organized into three segments. The first segment focused on communication for resilience, this second segment focuses on resources for resilience, and the third segment will be on planning for resilience. Today's session is the last in our series on resources for resilience and will provide a primer on the Utah Office of Tourism, it's programs, and the resources that the office provides.
As with all of our sessions, this session is particularly targeted towards people working in and with the tourism industry, however we expect the content of today's session will be relevant for anyone interested in this topic. Today we are joined by three special guests from the Utah Office of Tourism, which I will from time to time refer to as UOT, who will be sharing their wisdom and expertise as well as the resources that are available from their office. Our speakers today are: Bianca Lyon UOT's Director of Community and Partner Relations, Selena Sinclair the office's Partner Relations lead, and Flint Timmins, the office's Destination Development lead. Our speakers will join us in a moment, for now I just want to say thank you to all of them for being willing to join us today to share their wisdom for the audience. A few important things to note as we get started: this session is being recorded, we will share the session recording along with a webinar summary via the training website after the event. In a moment we are going to jump into the presentation, and throughout the presentation we really hope that those of you on the live webinar will engage and interact with us. So how we're going to do that is we're going to have
some questions we're going to pitch to you via the chat function and zoom, we really want to get some input from you about what you're experiencing, what you're thinking, what you care about, so again we're going to do that via the chat function and if you have specific questions for the panelists during the presentation we're going to ask you to put those in the Q&A function on chat, or, excuse me sorry, the Q&A function on Zoom so you can find the chat function and the Q&A function on the bottom of your Zoom screen. To recap again, we're going to pitch some questions to you I'm going to do that via chat so when you see those questions type your response into chat. Make sure your responses are going to everyone and you can enter those that way and then if you have questions for the panelists please open the Q&A function and put those questions in there.
So let's give this audience engagement a try, I'm going to ask everybody to get your chat open. You can use the chat button on the bottom of your Zoom screen, please click on that, open that up. Please make sure that your chats are going to everyone so you should see that option in the chat function. And my first question to you all via chat is: In what ways do you currently work with the Office of Tourism? So you can think of that as whether you use their resources, data, have partnered with them, so I'd love for everyone just to take a moment type something into the chat. If you haven't worked with the office, that's fine you can put that in there too. Take a moment type that
into chat. Doesn't need to be a long response. And whenever you're ready you can just hit enter. And then as people's responses come in we can watch and see what people have to say. Give us about 20-30 seconds to get some things in the chat. I'm already seeing people saying data and grant resources. Seeing using their resources getting information on market changes committees along with the office. Gonna give about 10 more seconds to get some more responses and we'd love to hear from you all.
A few more responses coming in, again lots of people saying resources, market information, partnerships. Some words reoccurring here, PR opportunities, I think we'll hit on a lot of these things today so if you're not already partnering with office of tourism in these ways you'll learn how you can. I'm going to pitch another question to you all and would love to see some audience engagement, thanks to those of you who are sharing your responses, I will note that our panelists are watching what's coming in in the chat and they might build on the things that they see, so it's a good chance to inform the panelists so they can respond to what's coming in. So next question, this is a long one, but basically it's a two-point question, what resources, so people mention they're using resources, what resources such as information, funding, consultation, partnership would you like to see more of from the Office of Tourism, and/or what needs or opportunities in your organization or community can the Office of Tourism best help with? This question came from the Office of Tourism. They are hoping to get some feedback from you all today to
inform their future efforts. So I'm going to give you just a little bit of time, I know that's a longer question so I'm going to give a little bit more time and hopefully we can get some responses in via chat. Again, just a reminder to make sure that your responses are going to everyone. And seeing responses come in, I'm going to give us about 30 more seconds again I know it can take a little time to enter a response. I'm seeing responses coming in, primarily like to see trends in people coming in and out of the state, the and the economic impact there. I will note that the Office of Tourism is not promising to do these things, and they're going to take this feedback very seriously. Seeing the responses of want more consultation and again that interest in market changes, international travel potential.
Just a little bit more time for folks to get some responses entered. Thanks to those of you who have. Seeing an interest in first responder and infrastructure assistance. I will note that our next red emerald training series session is on housing for tourism employees, so that kind of ties into some of those related concerns. We'll talk more about that as we close it today's session. All right if anybody else has additional thoughts, now's a great time to get those entered, and before we get started I have just one more question for everybody: Okay final question for you all just to help inform the rest of our session together, we'd love to hear from folks just what's one thing you're hoping to get out of today's webinar? Take a moment type your response and I'll give just about 30 seconds for this one. Give about 15 more seconds for folks to enter things, again this is your chance to inform what the speakers might focus on so thanks to those of you who are sharing thoughts. While a few more
come in, I'm just seeing Office of Tourism sharing their resource opportunities and details, I think you'll get plenty of that today. Just additional knowledge about Office of Tourism, I think we can hit that aspiration. Updates from the Office of Tourism and what they're focusing on, how small specialty companies can grow through, um, not sure if that's meant to be the Office of Tourism, and continue to learn what Office of Tourism offers local businesses. So again I think we'll hit on those things, just a note to our speakers that those were some of the aspirations. As we go forwards, when the speakers join us I would just encourage you again to riff off anything you've seen in the chat if that's relevant. And then finally, just so we all know what to expect, today's presentation has been prepared jointly by our speakers. In a moment they will all come on
they're going to just kind of riff off of each other as they go through and they're going to um share slides along the way. So hopefully, as always, we have no technical difficulties and everything works smoothly. So before we start just a final reminder to submit your questions to the speaker's via the Q&A function we should have time at the end of today's presentation to respond to those questions. So with that I am going to turn it over to our speakers, I'm going to ask our speakers to come on, to turn your videos on, make sure your audio is working. And while they do that just again want to remind us that we are being joined by Bianca Lyon, the Director of Community and Partner Relations for the Office of Tourism, Selena Sinclair, Partner Relations lead with the Office of Tourism, and Flint Timmins, the Destination Development lead with the Office of Tourism. So with that I'm passing it over to you. Thank you all for joining us. Great, well we're gonna get our presentation rolling one moment.
Um Danya did such a great job of introducing our team, but my name is Bianca. I'm happy to be part of this program with you today and just want to thank the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism once again for their partnership through this series. We think it's been a great benefit to the state and it's certainly been a benefit to us. And we'll reference some of the other discussions that we've had throughout the series and highlight a few more and so we're just grateful to IORT, The Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism for their partnership.
So again, Danya did a great job of introducing our team, if you don't want to advance the slides flint, we are the destination of partner relations team. Again, my name is Bianca, and with me on the presentation today is Selena Sinclair, our Partner Relations lead and Flint Timmins, the Destination Development lead. We're the newest Department I suppose of the Utah Office of Tourism, and we're here on behalf of our entire office, our colleagues here at the youth office of Tourism. We're really excited to familiarize you more with our team and all the functions that our office does, and tell you a little bit more about our goals.
So just to kind of keep things on a high level, we thought it'd be helpful just to share with you our vision, and our mission statement. Our vision is a state United and welcoming the world to experience soul awakening adventure, and our mission is to elevate life in Utah through responsible tourism stewardship. And if you'll go to the next slide, we'll see that that all comes from our red emerald strategic plan. In 2019 we we further refined and developed the strategy that is the basically the blueprint for our office, for our goals and for our projects, and certainly for all the work that we're doing. So you'll see here that we have kind of four areas where we're focusing our efforts: one is to continue our powerful branding, and we'll talk a little bit about what that means later in the presentation. But to keep our marketing strong, to keep uh Utah um top of mind for visitors, and to continue that that powerful that powerful brand to our visitors both domestically and internationally.
The second is to prioritize quality visitation, not just quantity of visitors. And that happens in a lot of different ways that's certainly in the refinement of our marketing strategy, but also I think the work that our team does to really um to really develop communities in the way that they intend their communities to to accept visitors and to really inspire people to be thoughtful in their travels. The third is, again, to distribute visitation that means certainly throughout the state of Utah to communities who are prepared to receive them, but it also means um the time of day in which perhaps visitors are coming and that's a great example of why dark sky tourism is such a priority for our office, is it does encourage that thoughtful type of visitation to different times of day and can certainly mean different types of year as well. And the fourth is to enable community-led visitor readiness, and this is something that we're really focused on in our team, helping our communities develop their tourism economies in the way that they would like. So this is a little bit of a recap of where our marketing comes from, each year we receive funding from the state legislature. These are two kind of figures here on the right hand side. We typically are around 22.8 million dollars and that's what we received
in this last legislative session and that goes to fund the majority of our marketing as an office, but you will see here that the sports commission will receive 10 percent of that of that funding. For those who aren't familiar with the Utah Sports Commission, they seek major sporting events and try to attract those major sporting events to the state. The 20 percent that is dedicated towards our co-op marketing fund, we'll talk a little bit about that later on in the presentation and many of you on the call are perhaps familiar with the the co-op marketing fund. That allows us to match local dollars to support locally led tourism initiatives. And then the rest of our marketing functions are funded through that 70 percent in that dark blue space.
So I will hand this next part off to Selena Sinclair and she'll talk a little bit more about what we're doing in the partner relations realm. Great thanks Bianca. For all of your information, we are now going to break down the next sections of the presentation by our individual teams, so we're going to start with our own team. Go ahead Flint. So you'll be hearing a lot about the resources that we offer today, there's going to be a lot, but I'm here to reassure you that the information for all the topics that we're going to discuss today can be found on our industry website which is travel.utah.gov. Additionally, you'll see that little orange box at the bottom of the screen we have put one on each of the slides. This helps you identify who our key staff member is that's responsible for the action or program, to help you all get in better contact with an individual if you're interested in learning more about a specific program. So, within the partner relations space, we've been working on some really cool new projects. One being our industry toolkits. We've developed two
within the last year: one being agrotourism, the second being dark skies. They provide information on things like visitor profiles, access to photo libraries, shareable digital content, and are a great year-round resource, available again on our industry website. Additionally we've been working on industry voice resources like this program, the Red Emerald Resilience Program, in partnership with the Institute of Outdoor Recreation and Tourism, and we're grateful for all of your participation that you've shown through this program.
Finally, I want to make sure that we're extending an invitation to you all to join us at the Utah Tourism Conference. This conference is held in partnership with the Utah Tourism Industry Association, known as UTIA. It is being held September 27th through the 30th in Vernal Utah, and more information and registration links can be found at utahtourismconference.com. Thanks Selena, so a little bit of what I'm doing and focused on on my side of things is to help execute on our "Forever Mighty" responsible travel and stewardship initiative. And you can see here, and I won't go through every single bullet point,
but we're essentially focused on creating those quality visitors that our strategic plan is is asking us to do. Supporting local business, and really celebrating the diversity of our communities and the diversity of our travelers. So maybe some of you have heard about it. If any of you have listened to our April series with the Red Emerald Resilience webinar, we talk a lot about responsible travel messaging. We talked a little bit about Forever Mighty and you can go back and listen to that session if you'd like. I highly recommend that you do, but it's a really important priority for our office and perhaps you've seen it in some of our marketing.
And then under what I do for the office of Tourism is our destination development programming. We offer some grants for communities, these are available at a county or municipal level, where we can help communities with technical assistance. To identify what role do they want tourism to play in their community, and what is the future of tourism is there. This is for destinations whether they're large or small, urban or rural, established or just beginning. We have a community assessment option where we will sort of secret shop a community to see, you know, from an outsider's perspective, how is tourism doing in the community. How are the offerings? how is the destination? Is there information available? I sort of refer to this as ripping off the band-aid for tourism. This is really helpful to really provide a fresh perspective in
a destination about how a out of state visitor, or a visitor from outside the community, might perceive the community. We also help provide technical assistance for strategic planning to come up with long-term plans for the future of developing and managing the destination. We work with a really well respected and established vendor in this field who will assist communities in in facilitating conversations to identify what is our tourism goal in the community, and what are steps we can take to achieve that goal. We've worked with several communities across the
state of all varieties and we're really excited to continue doing that this year. We're working with Millard County, Morgan County, and Iron County on this. Similarly to that, we also provide branding assistance. Branding and marketing development assistance. We work with a vendor to help create a brand, refresh a brand, or come up with marketing plans so that those communities can take their marketing dollars and more, target them more closely to their goals and identify what is the best use of those resources in order to attract the visitor that we want in our community. We also
help communities develop their new products, to provide new experiences for visitors, and to identify what are some of the needs for new experiences whether those are on public lands, recreation, dining or entertainment or otherwise. All of this, you know, our goal as as Bianca talked about in the Red Emerald Strategic Plan, is to have this be community-led but State supported. This isn't the Utah Office of Tourism coming in to determine what the role of every destination is in the state perspective. You know we're not out there saying, "you will be a mountain
biking destination, while you will be a historic destination, and you will be a food destination," it's really getting citizens together to really determine what role do they want tourism to play in their community, and how it fits into the broader community development picture. Part of what we're able to do with that is to pursue grant opportunities, and provide new resources for communities. And something that is new for us this year is a Federal grant from the Economic Development Administration or EDA. For the first time ever this year they are able to make their funding available to tourism, into these and specifically for marketing and developments and that's something that they've never really been able to do before. So as part
of a federal grant that was intended to increase the the recovery and resilience of the tourism industry, we were able to receive a nearly 4 million dollar grant to create new destination management programming, in addition to the ones I just covered. So some of these grant opportunities could cover feasibility, or economic impact studies for tourism product within the state. So for example, a destination may be curious about the feasibility of developing new equestrian trails on public lands nearby, or they may be interested in identifying what is the economic impact of agrotourism in our community currently, and is this worth investing more funding into, more resources. Along with that we will also be hosting product development studios, where we can assist communities coming together to identify new product, and similar to the strategic plan, what are the steps necessary in order to implement that new product. Maybe that is an agrotourism
trail. Maybe that is highlighting new cultural heritage opportunities to make sure that we are telling our story in a way that is attractive and educational to out-of-state visitors. Implementation of projects is always a necessary area for funding, and so we are providing some implementation grants to help start implementing some of those action items that are identified in the studies, in the studios, together, so that we can begin to really put rubber to the road and and start along our tourism journey. A fourth program that we're really excited about is what
we're preliminarily calling the Certified Community Program. And what this focuses on are product types, you know, whether that is agrotourism, perhaps it's cultural heritage, maybe it's outdoor recreation, and this will be a certification that comes from our office as well as our sister agencies and state government where we can certify that a community has met certain criteria whether that is in stewardship or infrastructure, to say that they are a good destination for this type of activity. Not only does it serve as a marketing opportunity for the community to say that they've been certified and stand out apart from the field, but it also symbolizes sort of a voucher or a guarantee to visitors that they will have a certain level of experience, and that is something that especially for newer destinations who are just starting along this path, there might be some hesitation on part of visitors to go to somewhere new that they haven't heard before. And we see that's why we get so much visitation to certain hot spots, because it's been established and there's a reputation there. A Certified Community
Program will help newer destinations or off the beaten path destinations really be able to get a foot in the door and put their name out there as quality destination. These will be open to public and non-profit organizations it will be a competitive grant process, and the application period begins on September 1st. There's a lot more to go with these programs, we didn't want to swamp you with them todaym but we will be holding another webinar on August 16th from the Utah office of Tourism and you can look for more information about that coming from UOT channels.
Thank you. So I will continue on our marketing team. As we saw in the the budget slide, a lot of our efforts go to marketing. We have a tourism management or marketing performance fund that most of our budget is dedicated to, and marketing is one of the chief roles of the Utah Office of Tourism, to market the state of Utah and its local communities as destinations, desirable destinations, for out-of-state visitors. So those might come from other states in the United States, or they may come from other countries around the world.
We have several brands and campaigns that might be familiar to many of you watching right now that we use to to do that, to get our name out there and to associate a brand and reputation to the state of Utah. "Life Elevated" which debuted in the early 2000s and is on many of our license plates, "The greatest snow on earth" to advocate for Utah skiing, "The Mighty 5 National Parks," and as Bianca mentioned, our newer sustainability and responsible visitation messaging of "Forever Mighty." All these brands have different roles, and campaigns have different roles to speak to different audiences but they all work together to responsibly market Utah as a destination and really identify and reach those visitors who are going to best enjoy and treat Utah on their trips.
One of the ways that we support that and we saw that many of our viewers are interested in this metric is to provide data and research on traveling and how the industry is performing and who is visiting Utah and what are they doing. Our metrics are available on our web our industry website travel.utah.gov and there you can find lots of really helpful information for both local communities, as well as businesses. You can identify you can see visitor profiles who is visiting Utah and sort of what are their demographics. Are they traveling solo or in
families, for instance. You can identify their tourism impact both statewide as well as in county specific level in various profiles that we have available to identify numbers of visitors as well as spending and categories of spending. We provide information on hotel lodging, occupancy and rates, park visitation to our national and state park units, international visitation, again numbers and where are they coming from. Earlier this year we under we undertook a resident sentiment survey to identify how do residents of Utah view tourism and its impact and lots of other data this is really just at the tip of the iceberg. Denise Jordan, our marketing analytics and research manager actually did one of a webinar in this series, I believe last month in July, where she went more in depth about the resources that we have available. So again we have a lot of
this data on our website and and if you need more specifics you're welcome to reach out to our team. So the most well-known funding opportunity for our office I would believe would be our cooperative marketing program, and that's because it's been around since 2005 so it's really well established. And it's that 20 percent of the pie chart that you saw represented when Bianca was talking through the tourism marketing performance fund and how our office is funded. And so what that does is it provides one-to-one matching funding with local dollars to UOT dollars for tourism-related public sector organizations and non-profits to do marketing efforts and programming.
And so we are currently wrapping up this year's round of the cooperative marketing program. Funding awards for this year will be announced during our board meeting that is taking place on Friday August 12th at the Land Cruiser Museum in Salt Lake City. The program is run in Partnership between Kelly Day, our Cooperative marketing manager, and myself as the partner relations lead, and we would be happy to discuss any ideas um any additional information around this grant funding opportunity in particular. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the great work happening on our creative and content team.
The first and probably the most widely recognized tool in the creative toolbox is visitutah.com. Rosie Serago is our content strategist, you can see here information in the upper right hand corner. She oversees all things um website related, storytelling opportunities, and really making the website work as hard as it possibly can to give visitors the right information that they need to have the best experience possible. So if you have ideas or refinements or you see something that doesn't look correct on on any of your pages that you see on our website, Rosie's a great person to reach out to, of course you can always reach out to our team, but Rosie's a great person to answer any questions on the website.
Of course our social media tools are an incredible incredible resource as well uh Ariana Reese, I've mispronounced her name, oversees our social media content both organic and paid, and oversees our contract with Sparkoff Media, who's our social media agency of record. So those are those are anything from, you know, those organic posts to ambassador and influencer programs, she oversees all of those opportunities for our office. And last but certainly not least is public relations. And a few folks in the chat referenced PR. Anna Lockridge is our public relations manager and tells the Utah story in the public relations space domestically, and you can see a couple examples of the great work that she's done to tell our story in the dark skies realm. Certainly getting the forever mighty message to travelers in
advance of their of their trips, and just sharing those unique cultural opportunities that are only found in Utah. So you can see some example of the media markets that she works with on a pretty regular basis, and we know that um that through PR we're really able to put our best foot forward to tell our stories as a destination. And one extra thing that isn't really mentioned here but is also really important part of our PR efforts, is that over the past year we are spending a lot of time to get our story right in the in-state media relations realm, and telling local media partners what we're doing, what our partners are doing, and what's important to them. And we look forward to sharing more examples of all the great work that's happening in that space as well. Next we're going to talk about our Global Markets team, which is also our International team So similar to what Bianca mentioned we're doing in the content creative space domestically, we're also sharing those resources those story leads, that digital content out with our key international markets. Everything from securing International journalists to write stories about Utah, to helping International tour operators develop new products for their itineraries when they're booking guests who come to Utah and visit.
Our key International markets include Canada, the UK, France, Germany, China, and Australia. The newest market that we've been working on and that is the new primary market is India for us, which is really exciting. Additionally we focus our efforts into secondary international markets as well, like Belgium and Switzerland, and to learn more about the work that we're doing in the international space I would highly recommend that you listen to the recording of the Red Emerald Resilience Training titled, "How to prepare for the return of international visitors." You get to hear from Rachel Bremer, our global markets director,
as well as a couple of key industry players in the international space, on what they're doing to prepare what the preparation timeline looks like to when we'll start to see a return of international visitors back to Utah, and it's a really really helpful pre-recorded resource. All right, then we also have a customer service team here in Utah Office of Tourism, to have direct communications with visitors and help answer their questions and direct them to the right resources, so our we have our customer service team led by Dave Hansford here in office, and they really you know can communicate with our with our visitors on every level through phone calls through email through virtual chat via our our website and also mailing out information, they are also in charge of distributing visitor guides and other physical information resources directly to visitors here at Council Hall in Salt Lake City where our office is located, as well as locally run and managed visitor centers across the state so that we can distribute information on the state to destinations all around. They are also great at directing our visitors to the right resources whether that's a local tourism office or a local business or experience or attraction. So one way to find out more about our office is to subscribe to our official Office of Tourism partner newsletter for information and industry updates. This goes out pretty regularly with information not only from our office but the industry at large to help keep folks up to date and in the know on the programs that we've discussed, as well as other opportunities that arise from us and partners. Of course it's not the only way to keep in touch with us, we have our
our industry website is a really great resource as well to find that information and of course reaching out to to us in the office with specific questions. Bianca, Selena, anything else to add? We covered all the major points. All right well then with that we're gonna open it up for some audience Q&A and just a little panel conversation. I do want to remind our audience if you have questions for the panelists,
if you want to hear more about certain things please put that in the Q&A and we should have time to respond to that. So to get us started with this conversation, I want to just highlight you covered a lot of material, the Office of Tourism does a lot of things, I just learned a lot and I've worked with Office of Tourism for many years, so I'm curious to hear from panelists what you each think are a few of the most important things for people to understand about how the Utah Office of Tourism can support local businesses, local governments, and others working in Utah's tourism industry? What are a few things we want to highlight? I guess I'll start, and I'm excited to hear Flint and Selena's ideas, perhaps a lot of them are the same. We talked a lot about the resources that we have on our website, but I think following us on our newsletter is a great way to stay apprised of what our office is doing, and the tourism conference is also just a great opportunity. If you're not already familiar in the in the ecosystem of tourism,
it's very accessible it's very friendly and it's very open, and I think that's what we all enjoy and love about this field of work. So if you've never attended or you don't attend regularly, we would just extend a warm welcome again to join us at the conference introduce yourselves if you don't already have a personal relationship with us, and and we'll really get the most out of your experience when when you can have those real life discussions and interactions with us. I think I would like to to highlight that Utah office of Tourism is not a regulatory agency, so we're not out there trying to make sure that everybody's paying the right taxes or you know are out there treating you know visitors a certain way according to law, you know obviously we want them to treat them well, but you know we're not a regulatory agency out there trying to make sure that everybody's complying. We are a marketing agency trying to invite folks to the state and we want to partner with our our local businesses and communities because that's what makes sense and that's how how it works best. I think another thing to to highlight there is that we don't always have a lot of grant funding that is available to private business, and this is done through statute through state law. So we aren't able to provide grants directly to a hotel for instance for renovations, but we are able to support them through the data that we've highlighted and some of these other resources and working with the local communities.
You know we don't have oversight over local tourism offices at the county or city level, but we can partner with them and share that information so that those services can then be offered at the local level where we feel they are most effective. The last thing I'll add is that the Utah Office of Tourism staff does really practice what we preach. You are hard-pressed to not find a member of our staff who is not out and about traveling into your destinations, experiencing your communities for their personal time not only their professional time, and so we really pride ourselves on on knowing our state well knowing our destinations well, but we need you all to support us in that as well and making sure that we're staying up to date on what's happening and what's new and what's going on for all of you. Great, thank you all for that. Building on what you've all said again just to kind
of pull out some things and highlight a few things, I'm curious how you think businesses local governments and others involved in Utah's tourism industry can best stay up to date with with the Office of Tourism is doing? Like you mentioned your newsletter, so what are some of the things that people who really want to know what you're offering currently or what you're thinking about currently should do to stay up to date? I think I'll jump in, you know obviously our newsletter and our industry website are great resources. Annually we have our tourism conference as as Bianca mentioned, and this is a really great place to network not only with with folks from our office but also with businesses and and stakeholders from around the state to get together talk about common causes and really make those connections, and you know discuss the the role and the future of tourism in Utah. In addition to that, you know we have a board that helps us make funding decisions and they meet monthly this is public meetings so we encourage folks to attend that, to participate, to read up the minutes on past meetings and provide their inputs. Help us as a public body best serve our our our clients, you know our our constituents. I'll add to Flint's comment that our board is also a traveling board, so we move throughout the state each month and are hosted at different locations. So it's not always you all coming and commuting to Salt Lake to be with us,
we're trying to travel out with our board to see you and host in your destinations as well. And as a team I will say we have the the pleasure of doing our own visits throughout the state. We've already met many of you on those travels, we can't wait to do more of that, so let us know if you if you have an opportunity in your community that you'd like us to see and we would be happy to to make a special visit to see you. So I want to take a couple questions that are here from the audience. I'm
going to start with this one, there's a question saying we used to be able to get mailing lists from the Office of Tourism but that stopped a few years ago. Is there any chance that we'll become a possibility again or was that mixed permanently? Yeah I think that is a good question. That might have been before my time at least so I think that is something that we can check into for sure and get back to you on that. And I would just say I know that the Office of Tourism staff are very accessible if you have questions or thoughts like that I'm guessing there's a conversation that can be had with with their appropriate staff members. So another question from the audience:
can you give a direct example of a project done with the experiential product development program? Maybe you could talk about that program a little bit give us a little more information. Yeah for sure yeah we cover that under the destination development technical assistance offerings that we have, and this one was a bit less organized and formal than some of those other ones, you know we didn't have a dedicated vendor to it and again we aren't able to provide direct resources and funding to you know businesses for instance to develop their product, but we are available to consult on these and discuss options and connect to the right resources and make sure that we are good partners on this. I think astrotourism is something that has come up quite a bit around the state of folks who are you know different attractions who are interested in um in incorporating some dark sky or astrotourism into their product offerings and again you know we're not able to provide funding, you know, to purchase new light fixtures for instance but we are able to connect them to the right resources such as (unknown) energy to the dark sky cooperatives that are located here in the state, so it is more of a technical assistance program where we can help make those connections. Selena, Bianca, anything you want to add there? Nope I think Flint got it right. So one thing I've been thinking a lot about is the Office of Tourism works with a lot of different partner organizations, and obviously some of those partners are people who this training program is serving but they're also sort of bigger organizations, and I'm just curious if you all can talk a little bit about other organizations that might be helpful for those working and involved in the tourism industry here in Utah? And other kind of external resources, things that you are very aware of and connected to but not aren't necessarily offered by your office? Yeah, I'll just say on the partnership on the partnership side of things, that's where we've really grown our presence with our Forever Mighty initiative, that's been a really important focus for us. Finding partners like Leave No Trace and Tread Lightly, those are really well recognized non-profit partners who really help us in that stewardship and responsible recreation zone. But
we also work really closely with some of our state agencies and there's some you know really you know likely partners, the Office of Outdoor Recreation is of course when we work really closely with, the Office of Cultural and Community Engagement, the state's Main Street Historic Main Street program, and those are just a handful of examples of the partnerships that we're creating in that space we just completed a partnership with the International Dark Sky Association and their astrophotography contest, so these are just opportunities for us to really share Forever Mighty with with new audiences and really builds the brand of Forever Mighty with the right types of organizations. But I'm open to what Flint or Selena have in that space as well. Another form of partnership that's kind of out of the box but a really essential one for us as well as our fellow state and local destination counterparts that are located outside of Utah. We use them as a resource a lot. Especially those that are located in the western U.S and
share similar, you know, issues or problem solving techniques or demographics to what we have here in Utah, and so I'm always recommending that you reach out if there is a local city or destination or state that may feel similar to what you're going through, to find those partnerships and commonalities between them and maybe stepping outside of our state boundaries as well. Flint, anything you want to add? No I think it's been covered pretty well, I guess I will just say that, you know we really do value these partnerships, you know there's so much available resources and help and advocacy from, you know, state, local, federal, non-profit partners that we really try to you know be really conscientious and thoughtful about that to make sure that we are, you know, just doing our work to be good stewards of the state of Utah together. So just want to remind the audience we've got time for a few more questions, if you do have any questions for our speakers please get those submitted via the Q&A. I have another question from the from a participant, have you organized an effort to advocate for funding assistance for destination communities to provide adequate levels of service when their populations increase drastically during high tourism season? Thoughts about that? Yeah it's it's a really great question, and you know this is really where destination management and development come into play. These are sort of newer terms
in the tourism industry. You know they've been around for a few years but it really is about making our destinations better prepared and resilient to shocks to the tourism industry, but also to make sure that they are the type of livable and viable communities that they want to be, and part of that is making sure that they are able to handle the tourism loads that they have, whether that is year-round or seasonal. We want to make sure that communities really understand and residents and visitors as well understand that impact. So part of that
is with working with communities to make sure that they are planning for this, to make sure that they are understanding that community that destination development is community development and community development has an impact on their impact of tourism. So we want to make sure that communities are planning for these things, that they are accessing the resources and applying them to tourism. So for instance there may be transportation funding that can be used to address a tourism issue, and that hasn't always been a connection made. We want to make sure that our communities are thinking holistically about tourism and understand that they can help guide it instead of simply react to it. One other important partnership that I think is worth mentioning is with our industry association. It's the Utah Tourism Industry Association, for those
who don't know UTIA is the often used acronym. They also advocate for issues for our industry and I think the programs that we're creating under this federal funding is giving us an opportunity to demonstrate why these Investments are are helpful long term, so I think that's why we are really excited to use those funds in new and different ways, to demonstrate that there's that need for investment sometime in the future. So I think that was a really thoughtful question and well well answered by Flint as well. Selena any other thoughts on that?
Excellent, we have time for I'm going to ask a final question and we'll have some time for each of the panelists to respond to link there response if they want to, before we do that I just want to note that there was a question about when the funding deadline for the federal grant funding was and that got answered in a typed form, so just want to say this for everybody that it's September 1st through October 31st. Seeing nodding heads, so we got that right, okay excellent. And I want to I want to add to that Danya, I think I maybe didn't mention this in the presentation itself, but those opportunities will be available annually for the next five years. Great, that is an important point. Always good to plan ahead and know that there's going to be a funding opportunity in the future that you can be well positioned for. So my final question to wrap us up and again we have about five minutes so if the speakers have more they want to say to this they can make this a longer answer or it can be a short one. Just curious to hear from you
all what you would say is just one final nugget of wisdom or an actionable takeaway you want to leave our audience with today? And feel free to take a moment before you respond to that. I think I have one ready in the can, which is that we are here to to help and we want to hear about your needs and your goals, and we want to be good partners for you. Whether you are representing a community in the destination side, or a business providing services to to visitors or residents, we want to know how we can best help you. You know our role is to market the state, but that doesn't mean come one come all, you know infinite visitation, we want to be thoughtful. We want to make sure we're
attracting the right visitors to your community and to your business. We want to make sure that we are being thoughtful of the impacts it's having on you and we want to make changes to how we do business in order to make sure that we are supporting you and what you're doing. Tourism is an economic development tool, and if it's no longer supporting our communities in the way that makes them function the way that they need to function to support local families and individuals and communities, then you know we want to make those changes. So we want to hear from you, let us know how we're doing and and what your needs are.
I was just going to echo that and just to emphasize the accessibility of our team. Our our smaller destination and partner relations team that's here today, but I think just our wider office, you know that's that's what our strategic plan is intended to do is to be informed by the feedback that we're receiving. And the more information we have, the better we can make decisions as Flint really said well. So you know reach out to us establish you know those connections with us and with others in the industry that will that will ultimately serve you really well. And get to know, you know, the resources that we offer if you don't already and and take advantage of the great data and research that we provide. And if you don't know where to look or how to make use of that information, we can also be helpful there too so just to just to let everyone know that we're here we're here for you.
I'll finally add a push for attending the Utah tourism conference. You've heard each one of us bring it up separately throughout this presentation, I think it emphasizes how important it is to our industry as far as networking and connections. A lot of the topics that we discussed today will be having individual breakout sessions during the tourism conference and additional topics that we discussed through the Q&A will also be to have their own individual keynote and breakout sessions. So these are the topics that we're working off of, trying to provide you more detail more depth more ways to get involved. If you're a first time attendee we have a brand new mentorship program that will pair you with a buddy, so that you don't have to go it alone. You can have a familiar face, you can find some guidance along the way and so it's a really great opportunity I would highly encourage anyone to attend.
Fantastic, thank you all for that I was going to ask the follow-up question of of what is the most effective way for people to communicate their their needs to you and I think I heard the answer is just the team is really approachable ,and really just reach out to somebody who's working in that area. So really want to leave with that note of asking the panelists to take to use this resource right to really follow up on that offer. So with that I'm going to just thank each of our speakers. Thank you so much for your suggestions, your advice, your inspiration,
for being in the state of Utah as a resource being great partners, I've had the opportunity to work with you. So with that speakers I'd invite you to turn your videos off. You don't have to hang out here while we wrap it up. Just a few things to wrap us up, I do want to turn back to the audience um and just take a moment wait to hear what you all are taking away from this session. So we're going to do that again via the chat, so I'd encourage you to get your chat open if you don't have it open currently I mean there's a button at the bottom of Zoom screen you can click on that open up your chat function, and we just want to hear from you all via chat. Please make sure your chats are going to everyone, What is one key thing you're taking away from today's session? So take a moment learn something new something stood out to you think about that when you're ready to type your response into chat and you can hit enter whenever you've got that in there.
Gonna give us about 15 more seconds to get some responses in there, again I'd love to hear from you all what you're taking away. Really use those resources that are out there that maybe you didn't know about, people interested in learning more about the EDA Grant. Giving it just a few more seconds to get a few responses in thanks to those of you who are sharing your thoughts. All right while maybe a few more responses come in I am going to wrap us up. So thank you to the audience for your participation, again those of you who shared your thoughts with us and we really love to see what's going on for the audience. We hope you all gained some insight from today's webinar learned some things about the resources available in the state of Utah. I'm hopefully taking away some concrete ideas about how you
can engage with the Office of Tourism and benefit most from their services. We do want to remind you all that this webinar is recorded and will be available on the training program website for future viewing. Please spread the word share this with anybody come back and watch it if you forgot about the resources we will also make the slides available so those will be there for you. And just a reminder that that training website URL is now in the chat there for you that's what it is so again check that out again there's all the past sessions information on there as well as information about our future sessions and speaking of future sessions. We hope to see you at some
of our future sessions the next one will be on September 6th from 12 to 1 o'clock MT and that session will focus on strategies for providing affordable housing for tourism industry employees. I work with a lot of Gateway communities tourism dependent communities and I know that is a huge issue, so we hope you will join we hope we can share some useful information with you all you can learn more about that session and register on the training program website. All right so we do want to finally just we want to get some feedback from you to make sure that the session is meeting your needs so after this session closes please look for an automatic survey that will be sent to your email. It should take you literally just a
few minutes to complete and you're doing so will really help us make sure that our trainings are helping you and other tourism businesses and organizations across the state and elsewhere, so thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to fill that out. With that a final thanks again to our panelists to our audience and to the team that put this together and we hope to see many of you at our next training session at September 6th. Thanks and have a good rest of your day
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