2021 BC Economic Development Award Winner
The Shop Local Passport campaign was a highly intensive 4-week, multi-faceted multimedia “shop local” campaign with a contest incentive. It consisted of the following elements:
Plaid Friday
Leading up to November 27, the campaign focused on public education around the economic benefits and spinoffs of shopping locally, focusing on “Plaid Friday”, which is the shop local version of Plaid Friday, to get on the radar of holiday shoppers.
Business Outreach and Signups
An inclusive network of locally owned businesses were contacted to join the campaign. We had 60 businesses sign up! Businesses got a spot on the campaign site (https://www.terrace.ca/shoplocal), a few passports to give customers, and a window cling sticker identifying themselves as a participating business to nearby shoppers.
Contest Campaign
With businesses and prizes in place, we set out on a large multimedia campaign running 3 weeks (Nov. 27- Dec. 18) in print, radio, and social media, with guerilla marketing from participating businesses and partners. We reached over 12,600 people, had over 74,100 digital impressions, ran 240 radio ads and 4 print ads. The contest was, you pick up your passport at a participating business or partner organization, then “travel locally” getting your passport stamped by participating businesses after a purchase. For every 10 initial stamps in your passport, one contest entry is awarded, and one more for every additional 5 stamps. After the deadline for shoppers to hand in their passports (Dec. 18), we had a live radio event doing a final promotion of the campaign that featured the participating businesses as we called out winners of the contest.
Prizes
Instead of asking businesses to donate prizes in a time of economic hardships, we got our partners to contribute funds to the campaign, and we were able to allocate $5,000 to purchasing prizes from each participating business.
During the pandemic we saw strong, multinational corporations take advantage of the public’s unease by making shopping online easier and more attractive than ever. Some smaller businesses were able to adapt fairly quickly, however in Terrace there is a large portion of long-standing businesses with older practices that had a harder, slower time making the switch to digital shopping. This period reinforced habits of shopping online at multinationals instead of shopping local online, and the Terrace and District Economic Response Team, made up of the City of Terrace, Terrace and District Chamber of Commerce, Kermodei Tourism (DMO), and Regional District of Kitimat-Stikine, worked together to come up with ways to counteract this behavior and encourage shoppers to look closer to home.
Coming into the heat of holiday shopping, the team devised a campaign that would incentivize the little extra work shoppers would need to do to shop local, whether that was at local shops’ websites, via phone for pickup or drop-off, one-on-one shopping, or limited number shopping – all options in the Terrace area.