Selling Humboldt Starts at Home, Tourism Leaders Say

Humboldt County Economic Development Director Peggy Murphy

As a “big shift” in the way the tourism industry is supported kicks off, Humboldt County’s economic development director has highlighted a grassroots element – the role of residents who talk about the county in person and online.

Peggy Murphy, the county’s director of economic development, described a new five-year plan for advancing the tourism economy in a June 10 online presentation to the Community Economic Resilience Consortium.

The way the county markets and supports tourism has been a shifting and sometimes contentious issue for years, with the county questioning whether it was getting enough bang for the buck in its funding and contracts with tourism organizations.

[Image from Ferndale Parade]

That’s brought the county to the point it’s at now, launching a five-year plan to reorganize the way tourism marketing is funded and governed.

“We have funded seven chambers of commerce and visitor bureaus through different means of providing them funding, but there wasn’t a lot of strategy behind the funding allocations,” said Murphy. “So listening to our partners, the community and the people that we’re funding, we really sought to address the concerns about lack of coordination and the impacts of what is being done in the tourism industry.”

Burls on a Redwood tree on the Avenue of the Giants in Southern Humboldt. [Stock photo by Kym Kemp]

Developed by the JayRay consulting firm, the new plan will be carried out through a contracted Destination Stewardship Organization. A tourism advisory board will be formed to make funding recommendations to the Board of Supervisors.

But as the presentation moved into a discussion mode, tourism marketing was framed in a more down to earth context.

“Word of mouth is really important,” said Gregg Foster of the Redwood Region Economic Development Commission, which hosted the meeting.

And word of mouth is increasingly done online.

“We have a pretty big kind of PR issue with how we sell ourselves before people get here,” Murphy said. “And we’re seeing that, for our area, those Humboldt Reddit subthreads are not doing us any good, guys.”

She advised being “very considerate of what we put out there about our community because with the new way that people are doing their itinerary planning, what we say about ourselves impacts how those itineraries get built.”

Elk at Usal Beach, California, June 2016.

When Foster encouraged support for the new paradigm, Murphy said it can be helped “even if it’s writing a nice thing online about Humboldt County.”

Hawks passing a snake. [Photo by Ann Constantino]

“This community has flaws like every other community,” said Foster, but he added that he’s traveled extensively throughout the Western U.S. and “we’ve got it going on compared with a lot of those other places and I think sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.”

Addressing the rhetorical online grumblers, Foster added, “So knock it off!”

While the conversation touched on online perceptions of Humboldt, most of the presentation focused on how tourism funding and oversight will be reorganized over the next five years.  Murphy described a broader context.

Detail of artist Duane Flatmo’s mural “Murray Field Vintage 1930.” [Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.]

“The way we market ourselves online also impacts our ability to do business attraction, recruitment, and employee recruitment,” she said. “And so I do think that especially for this group, we should be thinking about this as one cog in a bigger marketing message for the entire county.”

The economic stakes are high for tourism alone. Murphy said it’s a “major economic driver,” generating about $508 million in annual visitor spending and providing more than 5,800 jobs.

Carson Mansion and the Pink Lady [Photo by David Wilson]

In developing the new plan through surveys and workshops, there was consensus on shifting from “disconnected efforts” to a collaborative regional approach.

Pro-tourism efforts have been done between different groups and agencies “without much strategy behind them,” said Murphy. There’s been limited accountability and it was only focused on marketing, and it caused competing regions.”

Funding for tourism support largely comes from a share of Transient Occupancy Tax (TOT), a fee charged to hotel and lodging customers.

Chamber of commerce groups are concerned about losing funding, as the second year of the new plan will see them competing for it through a competitive process.

The Destination Stewardship Organization will get 45 to 50 percent of the TOT share for “core operations, marketing and stewardship” and the county will get 10 to 15 percent of it for “oversight and administration.”

Visitors at Trillium Falls near Orick. [Photo courtesy of John Chao via Redwood State Parks]

Money from a Tourism Region Fund, making up 20 to 25 percent of the funding, would go to local groups with the Tourism Advisory Board making recommendations to supervisors for final funding approvals.

Murphy said the goal is to advance a “unified, countywide strategy” with “transparent performance-based funding and clear oversight and reporting.”

She differentiated between the old and new approaches.

“We are using a destination stewardship model in the strategy, not a destination marketing organization model,” she said.

Buck in the ocean at Shelter Cove [Screenshot of a video by Kayla Briggs]

It will involve “aligning our tourism regions so that they are promoting one another, saying the same things and delivering the same message,” she continued. “With that, the strategy includes a newly proposed governance model, with very clear roles — there’s clear accountability built into this and it is stewardship-based, not just about marketing.”

Murphy said the strategy is “based on national best practices” and will unify the community to tell “one cohesive Humboldt story.”

Tree swallow [Photo by Ann Constantino]