DBBA Weekly Update | 12/10/2020

It was another busy week at the DBBA.  We worked closely with the City of Bend to get new parking signs installed all around the district.  This is just the first of many steps to make parking in Downtown Bend easier, more intuitive and user friendly.  We also requested easy-to-read graphics from the City of Bend so that we had the tools we needed to communicate about parking in Downtown Bend.  We received these assets and added them to our Google Drive of assets that we provide all businesses in the EID district.  These assets include all Downtown Bend logos, Downtown photos, Art Walk logos, COVID19 resources, and more.  

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We finalized all of the ads for The Source Weekly's Downtown Holiday Shopping Guide this week, and we continued to use our social media channels to promote Downtown Bend and all of our local businesses.  

This week we did a lot of background work and really began to dig into future planning and preparing for the next EID cycle.  If you don't know, the EID stands for "Economic Improvement District" and it's one of the way's that the DBBA is funded.  The DBBA also runs revenue generating program and engages in fundraising efforts in order to provide Downtown with more support and beautification.  Staff worked this week on preparing program budgets for the next three years as well as planning a reimagined Oktoberfest for 2021.  

We also began working on our Downtown Banner Program for 2021, reaching out to people and organizations that might want to reserve space in 2021 and getting them on the banner schedule.  We manage about 100 banner poles in Downtown Bend. This includes all of the sales, maintenance, billing, installation, removal and scheduling for this program - which is pretty cumbersome.  It's an incredibly robust program.  We are happy to be able to provide this service to our community, plus serves as one of the revenue generating programs that help provide for Downtown's vitality.  

​We successfully rolled out our Digital Downtown Dollars/eGift Card program this week - and in just 4 days we already had 30 business signed up and had sold 10 certificates.  We anticipate this program being a huge success and we are excited about going out and getting sponsorship for sales incentives to help us drive more traffic into Downtown Bend.

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Of course, not a week goes by that we are no out on the street keeping Downtown Bend clean and presentable.  We are proud to work every week towards our mission of increasing the vitality of Downtown Bend!