David Fortier, director at the Chamber of Commerce, gave a brief presentation at Battleford town council this week about the Chamber’s new Action Battlefords initiative.
Action Battlefords is an effort to involve the local business community in creating a safer community and improving the area’s reputation. The presentation involved asking the town for support and to spread the word about the campaign.
“Typically the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t get involved in social-type issues, we’re more involved with promoting and advocating for business,” Fortier said, although recently, such issues have attracted the interest of the business community.
The Action Battlefords campaign has three ways of achieving its goals: promoting and recruiting Citizens on Patrol, funding youth programming and enacting marketing campaigns to promote positive aspects of the community.
Fortier said already, new volunteers have signed up for Citizens on Patrol, and the City continues to look for volunteers. Action Battlefords’ role, Fortier said, in addition to attracting volunteers, would be to increase funding for programming and increased signage.
Action Battlefords also has plans to hire a full-time co-ordinator to plan, implement and market new and existing youth events.
“In the last few months, there’s been a lot more coming together of the organizations that work with our youth, which has been great,” Fortier said, adding Action Battlefords plans to take it “one step further” by trying to “get events that have been identified by the youth as events they want to be going to and events they want to have coming.”
Councillors mentioned how there already exist groups supporting youth in the Battlefords, but Fortier said the goal of Action Battlefords would be to not overlap with such groups.
Fortier also spoke about how the initiative is working with marketing specialists in and outside the Battlefords, and a firm in Saskatoon that specializes in reputation management.
The goal of the marketing campaign, Fortier said, is “to focus on positive news stories, positive business initiatives, local volunteers, local athletes, all that’s great about the Battlefords.”
“Right now you do search engine searches and it’s not such great stuff coming up on the first couple pages,” Fortier said.
