Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau

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30 Years of Selling The City of Trees
06.04.2012
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Each year, tens of thousands of visitors find their way to Boise. They dine in our restaurants, shop at our stores, and ride with our taxi drivers.

Many, of course, come to visit friends and family. But many others come as part of organized groups: business meetings, conventions, sports tournaments, reunions and other events. Why choose Boise? Many reasons, not the least of which is the tireless work of the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau.

This year marks the 30th anniversary for the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau (BCVB). The BCVB operates as the city’s de facto marketing arm, working with meeting and event planners from around the country, even around the world, to convince them to bring their groups—and their dollars—to Boise.

It works.

Tourism has grown to a multi-million dollar industry in Boise, spreading out-of-towner spending among hotels, car rental companies, restaurants, florists and more. As an example, more than 1,500 area residents are employed in the Ada county hotel business alone, representing a payroll of more than $26 million, according to the Idaho Department of Labor.

“A lot of the businesses that benefit from tourism don’t think of themselves as being in the travel business,” explains Bureau executive director Bobbie Patterson. “But the truth is tourism is an incredible economic engine for Boise, but it doesn’t happen without a lot of hard work by a lot of people in the community.”

Tourism may be big business now. But it wasn’t always that way.

The seeds of Boise’s tourism industry were first planted way back in 1959 when a group of city leaders pushed to form an auditorium district, a government agency with taxing authority to build and market, among other things, meeting and event centers.  But without continuous leadership, the effort lost momentum and stalled.

Years later, some city leaders still saw the opportunity tourism presented for the city. In response, the Boise Metro Chamber of Commerce started its own convention bureau in 1976. With a diminutive budget and a single employee—former stay-at-home mom, Bobbie Patterson—the Chamber’s convention bureau set to work marketing Boise on a shoestring.

“We just scraped together what ever tools we had and figured things out,” Patterson says.

Over the next few years, the bureau added a couple more staff members and continued its work under the direction of the Boise Chamber of Commerce.

By 1982, the possibility of tourism as an economic driver seemed brighter. The 12,000-seat Boise State Pavilion arena was under construction, the Velma V. Morrison Center for the Performing Arts was in the works, and interest in building a convention center in downtown Boise was renewed. With this backdrop, and with the prospect of additional funding from the newly formed Idaho Travel Council, a decision was made to spin off the bureau into an independent not-for-profit agency, the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau. After all, city leaders and the auditorium district reasoned, what’s the use in building a convention center if there isn’t a plan to fill it.

The group, supported in part by the auditorium district, moved into its own space across the street from the Chamber of Commerce.

“We had rented what was literally a hallway,” Patterson recalls. “We had nothing but a typewriter and a small houseplant. No pens, no desks, nothing.”

That was April 1, 1982. Today, three decades later, Patterson still leads the effort to sell Boise as a destination from a modest, though clearly an upgrade from their first humble hallway, office in downtown Boise. The shelves in her offices are lined with awards and mementos from her career, including keepsakes honoring her as the first ever woman Chairperson of the International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus. The plant that she hand-carried from her Chamber office to the first BCVB offices still sits in the corner.

“It was a cold spring day our first day on the job for the Bureau,” she says. “I knew if that plant could survive the trek, we could too.”

The staff, at that time Cindy Scofield, Steve Bly, Kay Hurliman and Patterson set to work. Early that summer, that team was joined by Terry Kopp, who still works at the Bureau, serving as the Director of Sales. Lisa Edens, the current Senior Sales Manager, has been at the Bureau for 22 years.

“We were so naive, but we were determined,” Patterson says. “We knew we needed a brochure and business cards, but we had a very tight budget so we had to be creative.” Their solution? Print a brochure, then use scraps from the printing process to create business cards and notepads.
 
Next the Bureau turned its attention to photography. But without a budget for professional photographers, they realized they’d have to do it themselves. They purchased a $59 Pentax camera and BCVB employee Steve Bly, a former parks department employee in both Washington and Idaho, set to work documenting Boise’s beauty in photos.

Bly, who had never seriously used a camera, took right to it.

“Steve started started taking pictures, thousands of pictures,” Kopp recalls. “He hasn’t stopped since.”

Today Bly is a renowned professional photographer who has twice been named “Photographer of the Year” by The Society of American Travel Writers.

Within a few years, the Boise and Convention and Visitors Bureau was having a measurable impact on the Boise economy.

In the mid-1980s alone, the BCVB was responsible for bringing 3,000 Wally Byam Air Stream trailers—the classic silver-clad RVs—and their 9,500 owners to Boise for a rally, resulting in an estimated $10 million boost to the economy. Other big events followed, including two years of hosting the prestigious National Governors Conference and significant sporting events such as the U.S. Cycling Championships.

The Bureau was on a roll.

“Those early successes helped us realize that our limitations are more in our head than in our pocketbook,” Patterson beams. “They gave us the confidence we needed and inspired our internal motto: if you believe you can bring an event to Boise, you can bring that event to Boise.”

The organization took that motto to heart, leading the charge for the creation of the original River Festival, more RV rallies, and countless corporate meeting and industry conventions. More recently, the BCVB took a lead role in bringing the Society of American Travel Writers, Special Olympics World Winter Games, and the Iron Man 70.3 triathlon to the the Treasure Valley. Taken together, these events have likely generated well in excess of $100 million in the local economy.

There are more than 3,000 convention and visitors bureaus nationwide, according to Patterson. All are competing for the same meeting planner and corporate dollar. A handful of large, iconic cities such as San Francisco, Chicago and Las Vegas, have an advantage for certain types of meetings. But for mid-sized and smaller events, the cost and the cliche-factor of these cities can actually be a turn-off for meeting planners. That’s when they turn to smaller markets like Duluth, Minnesota, Rapid City, Iowa, and, yes, Boise.

To win, the Bureau must identify the types of events best suited to Boise, then reach out to their organizers with a compelling message that incites them to take action. This means building relationships, both locally and with event planners across the country.
 
“Our job is to see Boise as a product,” Patterson says. “Wepromise great experiences and are dependent on everyone else in the community, from TSA agents to hotel clerks, to deliver. We’ve never been disappointed.”

Patterson says the follow-up surveys the Bureau conducts show that 80% to 85% of visitors think they could live in Boise, a sign their experience was positive on a very personal level.

“Visitors come here and feel very welcome, very comfortable,” she says. “ It’s a combination of the friendly nature of Boise residents and the services we provide to make sure they feel important.”

As rewarding as this work is, both personally for the Bureau staff and financially for the city, most of it is done quietly, behind the scenes and with the consistent support of grants from the Idaho Travel Council.

“Everybody occasionally goes to some event for their job or hobby or something,” Patterson, explains. “But nobody ever asks themselves why they are meeting in Albuquerque or Boise or wherever?”

The answer to that question, at least in part, is convention and visitors bureaus. And with 30 years of successfully selling the city of Boise as an event destination, the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau sees much more opportunity ahead.

“The only thing stopping us from bringing even bigger events and dollars to the city are our physical constraints like the number of hotel rooms and convention space,” Patterson says. “As we continue to grow those, the opportunities are endless.”

After all, as the Boise Convention and Visitors Bureau team will tell you, if you believe you can bring an event to Boise, you can bring that event to Boise.

 
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