Spotlight Series: Mass Office of Travel & Tourism
Good afternoon, friends. Welcome to the next webinar in our Spotlight series. We're so glad to have you with us here today, this afternoon, and let's dive right in. My name is Michael Bobbitt. I'm the executive director of Mass Cultural Council.
We are your independent state arts agency. We are charged with bolstering the Commonwealth's creative and cultural sector. I'm so excited to welcome you today to our Spotlight series. This is a new webinar series we've recently launched to curate information and build awareness about opportunities and resources that may be of interest to the creative and cultural sector today. We are really excited to have here with us today welcoming back our friends from the Mass Office of Travel and Tourism who will provide some updates on the Mass 250 program, including how cultural organizations can take part. They've been doing a lot of work on this over the past few years, and MA 250 has the potential to be huge for the cultural sector, so I really encourage everyone to take notes and consider how your organization can be part of this celebration.
Before I turn it over, I just have a few housekeeping notes. This webinar is being recorded and will be posted to our YouTube channel in the coming days. Auto generated captions are turned on and active for anyone who would like to utilize that service. You'll find the button to turn that on at the bottom of your screen. Finally, we ask that if you have any questions throughout the course of the webinar, please use the Q& A feature rather than the chat.
We find that things can often get lost if they're in the chat. And so the Q& A feature will help us keep things on track and answer all your questions. Now, please welcome Kate Fox and the team from the Mass Office of Travel and Tourism. Thank you, Michael, and good afternoon. I am Kate Fox, I'm the executive director of Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism.
We are not independent. We are a state agency. We are part of the Executive Office of Economic Development, and it is our job to market the state of the entire state of Massachusetts as a great destination for travellers and tourists. And we do that through both domestic and international marketing strategy. And for the last year and a half and for the next year and a half, we are right in the middle of the Massachusetts 250 campaign. I am delighted to be here to introduce Sheila Green, who is our MA 250 coordinator.
She's doing great work connecting the dots for all of our partners across the state, both museum, cultural, creative and private sector and tourism partners. So there's a ton of work going on. If you are not on our mailing list, I encourage you to join us. If you are not on, visit ma. com and you are a tourism welcoming site, I encourage you to add yourself.
It is free to do so. We are happy to share additional information. But without further ado, I am going to turn it over to Sheila Green who is going to walk through the latest updates for Massachusetts 250 and how you can engage with the campaign. Thank you so much for your time today. And Sheila, over to you. Thank you, Kate.
Thank you so much and thank you, Michael. It is a pleasure to be with all of you today. We are excited about all the things you have going on and excited to share what we have going on at the Mass Office of Travel and Tourism, specifically around the Massachusetts 250 campaign. So Kristen is running my our deck. So if you want to share the screen and we can get started.
OK, so next slide. Thank you. So Massachusetts 250th is a really big deal for our state to to 2025 is our year to celebrate the semi quincentennial. It is a year to embrace Massachusetts pride. It is a time to collaborate and showcase all that Massachusetts has to offer travellers and tourists.
It is our time to commemorate our history and embrace our historic places. It is a time to share the little, little known and untold stories. As Kate mentioned for the next two years, we are also celebrating. We are not only commemorating the 250th, we're also celebrating the amazing future of our state built on 250 years of innovation and independence.
I have been traveling the state to meet many people and hear the stories of our history and our innovations and innovators. I participate in many virtual meetings just like this one to embrace our statewide engagement. So you can see we have much to to build pride for our state. So next slide, Kristen. So the Massachusetts 250 strategies include three basic programs, marketing communications, partnerships and signature events.
So for marketing communications, we have a marketing partner and I've built an ad campaign that is both domestic and international. We have our website, massachusetts250.org, which is filled with tons of information. We have social media on Instagram, Threads and Facebook, so please follow us. And we have a public relations partner that includes earned, earned media, creating blogs and newsletter content for our partnerships. Our goal is to promote events, programs, exhibits and everyone who is embracing the semi quincentennial. We have programming grants.
We have collaboration with the America 250. We have partnerships with all the professional sports teams in Massachusetts. Actually, last night we were at the WPNHL, which is a women's professional National Hockey League team, Boston Fleet game in Lowell at the Tsongas Arena, and we were cheering our hometown team on to a win and we gave out rally towels. So it was really fun, really engaging to have all these people attending such a wonderful game and engaging so many new people as we do every day. Signature Events. As many of you know, we officially kicked off the Massachusetts 250 with a launch event at the State House with the Governor and Lieutenant Governor in September.
We are planning a large public event for July 2026, but there's more to come on that now. Next slide, please. So our partnerships. So we officially kicked off Massachusetts. Wait, did I skip it? Oh, sorry, I did.
We also are working with the Massachusetts 250 Commission. We've created an executive committee which was formed in January to engage the corporate community. We have secured partnerships with all the state's professional sports teams.
As I mentioned, we had a fleet game last night. We have also secured partnerships with the following media organizations. For print, The Boston Globe, Yankee Magazine, El Planeta, National Geographic, Traveling UK. For broadcast, we have partnerships with WBUR. We're doing a series of 16 mini podcasts that'll represent the many different regional travel, regional tourism councils across the Commonwealth. We have a relationship with NBC and WCVB Channel 5 or ABC affiliate and WGBH.
Next slide please. So the following are big historic dates from the American Revolution in Massachusetts. To note, Leslie's retreat took place in Salem last couple weekends ago. It was a big reenactment. It was great economic impact for the city of Salem with hundreds of people who came in to see it and then visiting the different museums and sites and restaurants throughout the city. The next big reenactment will be Patriots Weekend in April.
It'll be in Lexington, Concord, Arlington, Lincoln and Carlisle. Each of those towns have different pieces that will be happening throughout the Patriots weekend, which will begin on April 18th and go through to Monday, April 21st. Then in May we have the Battle of Chelsea Creek, which will be remembered in Chelsea and East Boston.
Revere is also involved, so these communities have come together to create a commemoration for the Battle of Chelsea Creek. Then in June we have the Battle of Bunker Hill. So the in Charlestown there'll be the Bunker Hill Parade, followed by a big reenactment of the Battle of Bunker Hill in Gloucester the following weekend. So the last two weekends in June will be a lot of activity around the Massachusetts 250 and the commemoration of the battles that took place for the American Revolution in Massachusetts. So the fact that Charlestown and Gloucester too are working together as communities to commemorate our history is another example of how communities are working so closely together over the next couple of years. Then in January through March 2026, there'll be a reenactment of General Henry Knox Artillery Trail from the New York border all across the state into Boston.
Reenactments will take place in in Greater Barrington, Springfield, and several other towns before reaching Dorchester Heights on Evacuation day, March 17th, 1776, which is when the British finally left our port and opened our port after it'd been closed for two years. And then of course, the signing of the Declaration. So July 4th, 2026, the whole United States will be celebrating America's independence. Next slide please. So to to bring all this together, we have created a number of programs for you to embrace the semi quincentennial. These programs are designed to market and promote what you are already doing.
So for example Museums 250 is a great program. We have museums from across the state that are participating the place. What each museum can do is place an MA 250 sticker by an object, piece or exhibit that represents the American Revolutionary period or it could represent a first or innovation.
Visitors will know that piece that has our MA 250 logo represents the Massachusetts 250 and the Semi Quincentennium. We will post all participating museums and historic sites on our website under Museums 250. So when visitors go to our website, they know that they can go to a particular site to see pieces from the revolutionary era. We've also excited that we launched a new program in February called Massachusetts 250 Lunch and Learn. We've created a series of 30 minute noontime virtual meetings for anyone to attend.
The speakers include a historian, executive directors, a preservationist, museum curators from various museums, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, and so many more. Our next Lunch and Learn is on Tuesday, March 11th at noon and our special guest speaker next Tuesday is Kayla Coleman, the executive director of the New England Museums Association. I talked to Kayla earlier this week and she just got back from Washington, DC and she's going to share some of what she learned and the impact on museums. We also have the previous two Lunch and Learns, which included Doctor Noel Trent from the African American Museum, and they're those you can see online.
So they're posted online. You can watch them on the YouTube link. These events are easy to register.
You also just go, click on the link to register, put in your name, and you're all set to go. You can even register right up to the time that the the event starts. Also, if you have a speaker you would like to recommend for this series, please reach out to me and let me know because we are open to adding more speakers all the time and the more diversity we have in the representation, I think it'll be more impactful. Another program that we've created is called Revolutionary Weekends.
This is currently a work in progress. Our intention originally was to have communities create revolutionary weekends, but we've turned this into an opportunity to create travel itineraries to celebrate revolutionary attractions, restaurants nearby and accommodations in different communities that that go across the Massachusetts. So it's an opportunity to bring people to your communities and experience what you have to offer. And then we talked about the Knox, the General Henry Knox Noble Train Artillery, the signature event.
And then in the summer of 2026, of course, in addition to the FIFA World Cup, we have Sale 250, which is the Sale Boston coming to our harbor. It's a wonderful international event that brings thousands of visitors from all over the world, from these ships to our shores and into our city and beyond. So that's a really exciting event that we all want to embrace.
The next slide, please. How to get involved? Well, I have very exciting news. I'm happy to announce that last evening our next round of MA 250 grants was launched.
So you can find the application link on our website at massachusetts250. org and it's a submittable application. This round of grants will be for $2,000, 000. The amounts for funding will range from 5000 to $100,000. The grants are once again for programming and marketing for things that represent our history and the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.
In Massachusetts, grant applications must Applicants must also provide information about how the funding will impact travel and tourism in our state. The deadline for these grant applications is April 11th. So we look forward to all of you participating. Last time we did the grants in September, we had 172 applicants totalling $8.
9 million. We were able to award 37 grants for 1. 5 million. So we know it will be a competitive grant process, but we encourage all of you to participate and be creative and look forward to your engagement and hopefully funding what your programs.
So that's very exciting. So the other thing I want to encourage you to do is sign up for our emails on our website. Also very easy to do. All you have to do is plug in your e-mail address and through that you'll learn about announcements about the grants. We're going to be hosting a grant webinar on March 12th for all to participate who have any questions about the grant process and you'll get newsletters and other information.
So next slide please. This is a wonderful example of the Mott campaign called Made Possible, Sparking the Imagination. I love this ad. I would like each of you to be creative and commemorating the semi quincentennial, our history of the revolutionary era and the many firsts that came from Massachusetts in the last 250 years. Next slide, please. Thank you very much for letting me be a guest and a part of your program today, your meeting today.
I appreciate being a part of everything that you're doing. Keep me posted please, on what you're doing. Here's my e-mail address.
Add your events to our website. It's so easy to do as well as your attractions. We have a lot of people visiting our website and we want everyone who is planning to come or within Massachusetts to know about your attraction that they can come visit.
And with that, I will take any questions that anybody has. Thank you. We can give it a minute, but I'm not seeing anything in the Q& A or chat right now. OK, Sheila, if they're you still recommend people program for the 2:50 so that they can take advantage of all the visitors that will come here to Massachusetts. I mean, people are going to do what they're going to do, but if we can help market what they're doing and they want to become a part of the Massachusetts 250, be creative and let us help embrace that and market it to a broader audience for them. Yeah, y'all, there may be people looking to buy 250 swag, so get on it.
Guess what we are going to be? We'll provide the stickers if they have pieces. I mean, we have like the Clark Art Institute has one particular exhibit that has pieces from the revolutionaries that they're participating. I mean, and then the more obvious museums that are participating, but it could be a historic site too. And then another exciting piece of news, We should have our Shopify shop to get sweatshirts and T-shirts and things up on our website by end of day tomorrow. But for this program, the museum's program will provide the stickers and they look like, they look like this. Very nice.
You can just add to a plaque, make it. We want to make it as easy for people as possible and embrace what everybody's doing to get the word out. But they also may be able to create their own swag and stuff on their group shops and things like that. And then we we encourage creativity and I know that there was something about telling all the stories of our history versus just focusing on the revolutionary period. Do you want to say a little bit about that? Sure, sure. So there are a lot of there's a lot people come to Massachusetts because of our history and there's a lot of history to celebrate.
There's innovation, there's the innovation trail. There's so many untold stories. There's, you know, there's, there's the little known stories. And what we're trying to do too is share those stories and then provide a place where people can learn more.
For example, Frederick Douglass, there's a new exhibit at the Museum of African American History in Boston with Frederick Douglass. You can also visit places where he lived in Lynn and then down in New Bedford. So we we want it if we talk about something or someone, we want to provide them with places, provide the tourism or visitors with places where they can learn more, if that makes sense. In addition to sort of being part of the MA 250 celebration, and you mentioned the other things that are happening around that time, Sale, Boston and FIFA, they're going to be a lot of people coming to Massachusetts, everyone. So let's take advantage of the fact that they're going to want things to do and the strategy may be aligning your programming that summer with 250 things. And then I think it would be really impactful, Michael, because all different, all different communities are embracing it in different ways.
Like I mentioned, Chelsea, East Boston and Revere are working together to embrace their communities. That's great. And then you, I think you mentioned the visit ma. com site, right? So friends, it's a free website to market your information. So make sure you have your own organizations uploaded onto the visit MA site. And I think that site may be actually being redesigned soon, but still get your information on it right now.
Yes, yes. And, and it's very active. If, if it doesn't have to do necessarily with MA 250, make sure it's on visit MA or put it on both if it's appropriate.
And, and we are really building up. We have over 200 and 50 events right now on our website and we have just 500 attractions on our website. So the more we can build that up, we encourage all of you to to post and present and it really takes no time. All right.
Yep. We do have a question, a chance to plug the Governor's conference on travel and tourism with the dates and what that is. But the question is, will there be more information about MA 250 at the Governor's conference? Yeah, good question and I didn't mention that, so thank you for bringing that up. So the Governor's conference is going to be March 18th and 19th in Springfield. The Governor and Lieutenant Governor are going to be attending.
I will be doing a panel with three different types of museums. I'm talking about the museum's 250 program and Massachusetts 250. And then there'll be a lot of different. There'll be 1 panel discussion is going to be FIFA sale Boston MA 250. The governor is going to be doing a fireside chat with the writer Ellen Hildebrand from Nantucket. So she's going to be talking about her books and her movies that are being made.
So there's going to be a lot of different types of ways to integrate tourism into into what you're doing that we're going to be discussing at the governor's conference. Great. Any more questions from our viewers? All right, well, Sheila, we appreciate your time and we're excited about the partnership we have with the Mass Office of Travel and Tourism and all the resources that you are providing the creative and cultural sector. Friends, take advantage of this. Make sure you are putting on your grant calendar the application.
I mean, it's, it's it's money out there. And then using visit MA, coming to the Governor's conference, making connections with your regional tourism councils, there's a lot of resources out there for you all. And think about how you can program for all the people coming to visit Massachusetts in the next couple of years.
Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Michael, and thank you for having me. And please reach out if you have any questions. I am totally open for all ideas and any speaker ideas that you have for our lunch and learns too. We welcome. Thank you so much and maybe we can send out information about the lunch and learns through an e-mail.
When we respond, let everyone know about this and then thank you, Sheila. Thank you, Kate who was here with us earlier. We appreciate the partnership and everyone.
This will all be posted on the YouTube channel in the coming days and we appreciate you attending. Thank you, Michael. Thanks everyone. Thanks so much.
Take care. Bye.
2025-03-17 19:01
