“Discover the Blue”
Posted on March 24, 2009
The regional tourism campaign, Discover the Blue, has received the Governor’s Award for Innovative Tourism collaboration. The award was presented by the Michigan Travel Commission yesterday in Detroit at the Michigan Governor’s Conference: Driving Tourism 2009.
The Discover the Blue campaign was created and launched in 2008 as a result of a series of “Waterfront Summits” hosted and convened by the Community Foundation of St. Clair County. The purpose of the summits, which included the waterfront communities from Algonac up to Lexington, was to seek out common goals and objectives of the downtowns. Throughout the course of several summits the participants identified two common areas: Tourism and Small Business Support.
The creation and implementation of the campaign was lead by the Blue Water Convention & Visitor’s Bureau (CVB). $50,000 in funding for the first year’s campaign came from the CVB, Community Foundation, Acheson Foundation, Port Huron DDA, Blue Water Area Chamber of Commerce, St. Clair Chamber of Commerce, Lexington DDA, City of Algonac and the Marine City Chamber of Commerce.
According to Marci Fogal, president of the CVB, this campaign marked the first time that a broad coalition of communities in the Blue Water region came together to create and fund a common tourism campaign. The partners of the campaign were so impressed that they increased the total budget for the 2009 campaign to more than $500,000 which includes a $125,000 matching contribution from the State’s Pure Michigan campaign.
The Community Foundation convened the Waterfront Summits as a way to allow community stakeholders to identify how the Foundation should invest its funds to benefit the unique waterfront communities of the region.
Chuck Kelly, chairman of the Community Foundation, said, “The waterfront summits we convened in 2008 resulted in two tangible new regional programs; the Discover the Blue Campaign lead by the CVB and the Small Business Concierge program funded by the County and the Foundation.”
