City of Cincinnati
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The City of Cincinnati's Economic Development Division is focused on major projects and the revitalization of downtown Cincinnati. It serves both as the City’s marketing department and as a liaison among all City departments and the business and development communities, and it provides financial, informational, and technical assistance to businesses seeking to invest in or grow in Cincinnati.
The Digital Doorstep
Looking to create the first public marketing communication vehicle since launching its new brand, the City hired Topic to develop a customer-friendly website for Economic Development. Goals for the site included elevating and exhibiting the new identity, communicating timely information, and positioning the City more competitively for site selectors and developers interested in doing business in Cincinnati.
Working closely with Economic Development staff, we assessed their needs and goals to gain a clear understanding of their purpose, their audiences and how they needed to effectively communicate to them. From this we learned that content accessibility and distribution was most important, so we designed a feature-rich website built around the concept of reportable content. We produced a comprehensive report building solution with utilities that allow users the ability to select, comment on, save and share relevant information via email, facebook and twitter.
Other features of the site include user-dedicated content sections, a robust data center with up-to-the minute statistics, current and completed project summaries with Flickr integration, real-time news with opt-in daily alerts, a shared calendar of events with the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce, and an integrated property search function using LOIS, the largest site and community database in the country.
Additionally, the new website is administered by a custom content management system we produced, providing Economic Development with the capacities to update all text-based content, generate new pages dynamically, create charts and graphs from data, post news and projects with inline imagery and video, select and integrate multiple RSS feeds, and more.
The new website signifies a huge step forward on how we communicate with the Economic Development community as we seek new investors and bring jobs to Cincinnati. This will help us to further compete in a global marketplace.Patrick Ewing Economic Development Director for the City of Cincinnati
Awards and Accolades
In the fall of 2010, the City of Cincinnati received an Excellence in Economic Development Award for the new website from the International Economic Development Council (IEDC). The honor was presented at an awards ceremony during the IEDC Annual Conference held in Columbus, Ohio.
“We recognize the City of Cincinnati, Economic Development Division for providing successful strategies to promote new paradigms in economic development in this period of global recovery,” said William Best, IEDC chair. “Our awards honor organizations and individuals for their efforts in creating positive change in communities. The City of Cincinnati, Economic Development Division is showing that they are at the forefront of the economic development profession and are using innovative and effective practices that can be replicated in other communities."