Destination Battlefords is not resting on its laurels when it comes to attracting events and conventions to the community in 2019.
At their annual general meeting Wednesday at the Battlefords River Valley Visitors Centre, the organization’s Executive Director Ryan Bater (who is also the mayor of North Battleford) outlined plans to keep up the organization’s focus on event attraction.
“There’s been a very strong focus on events and conventions,” said Bater. “We’ve been able to generate a considerable amount of success mostly in sports tourism.”
Bater pointed to the Pinty’s Grand Slam of Curling and the Saskatchewan Winter Games as examples, but noted the Battlefords is regularly hosting provincial meets and attracting conventions as well.
He pointed to a convention of city planners set for North Battleford, the 2019 Saskatchewan Professional Planners Institute conference, scheduled for Sept. 16-17. Also coming up is the 2019 Saskatchewan Parks and Recreation Association annual conference, happening Oct. 17, 18 and 19.
The provincial darts championship is also coming to North Battleford on April 12 to 14.
“These kind of things are now regularly occurring,” Bater said.
Attention has also been focused on content development at their website (Battlefords.com) and app, including social media and the development user-generated content.
They also continue their advertising efforts. They have video ads on YouTube and Facebook.
The new downtown cinema complex is now open, which Destination Battlefords sees as a further opportunity. Bater said their promotions will be on the five combined screens of the Capitol and Capitol Annex starting this week.
“That form of advertising has the highest retention rate,” said Bater.
Bater said they plan to continue their promotional efforts, but also pledged to move the organization into new areas.
One of the efforts will be to “build capacity” within the community to be a better host community. The intention is to train and potentially certify front-line staff at attractions, restaurants, hotels and elsewhere, so they can to be well acquainted with the things tourists can do and the events coming up and better represent the community.
The organization also is seeking to build more capacity in product development.
“We can be a lot stronger in the area of telling our story as a community, developing our historical assets, developing our cultural assets,” Bater said.
“This is all really big-picture stuff, and it’s huge, it’s going to be a massive effort.”
Destination Battlefords board chair, Russ Brown, further explained it was all about staying a step ahead.
“The old days of having a half a dozen pamphlets sitting on the counter that we could hand to tourists to try and build the industry is long gone,” Brown said.
He noted some opportunities have been identified in catering to the “international history buffs” who visit historical sites. As well, Brown said their organization has never properly engaged the First Nations communities in a serious effort to market their history and culture, so that will happen as well.
A strategic planning process is now underway and a draft was presented to the board this week. Once the plan is finalized, bylaw changes will happen as well. Bater said they hope to have this process wrapped up by May or June.
They also want to have their strategy in place well in advance of December, when their current funding agreements expire and they will be approaching their partners for funding again.
There were some changes approved to the governance structure of the nine-member Destination Battlefords board at Wednesday’s meeting. The representation from the City of North Battleford and Town of Battleford representation has been expanded from one appointed representative to two for each community. The Battlefords Hotel Association would continue to have two appointed representatives.
As for the number of elected representatives on the board, that is being reduced from five to three. Of those, at least two will come from the tourism membership.
The changes come from a desire to better reflect Destination Battlefords’ funding partners on the board.
