The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Key to success: play well with others
A third party performance assessment of the Gunnison-Crested Butte Tourism Association (GCBTA) suggests that a tourism association is more than the sum of its parts. In Gunnison County, at least, strategic partnership with local governments, local chambers of commerce and active board participation all become keys—or barriers—to success.
According to the study, performed by the Radcliffe Company to assess how well the tourism association is serving the county, the GCBTA is doing many things well. The purpose and structure of the organization to market Gunnison and Crested Butte as a vacation destination are clear; the GCBTA allocates a large portion of its budget—84 percent to direct marketing, where the competitive set contributes around 65 percent.
The GCBTA also effectively markets the region on a year-round basis, where other tourism associations in areas like Telluride or Colorado Springs rely on ski resort partners to market during the winter.
But according to the study, “The most fundamental challenge which will prospectively limit the county from maximizing the full potential of its visitor industry is the current fragmentation among Gunnison County industry and governmental leaders.”
Last month, the report sparked in-depth discussion between GCBTA staff and board members and the Gunnison County Local Marketing District (LMD)—the Board of County Commissioners wearing a different hat—which provided funding for the Radcliffe Company. The GCBTA is funded by a voter-approved 4 percent occupancy tax on hotels and vacation rentals, and the LMD sought to understand the return on that investment. The commissioners generally agreed that the study contained worthwhile observations; the next step is to determine the best way to use that information to move forward, particularly in addressing fragmentation and board participation.
“Where is that [fragmentation observation] coming from?” county commissioner Hap Channell asked.
“I think we’re actually aware of that, in part, with the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council,” GCBTA co-president Wanda Bearth said.
According to a follow-up interview with Mt. Crested Butte town manager Joe Fitzpatrick, Mt. Crested Butte donated $200,000 to the Tourism Association in 2009. But in 2010 and 2011, the Town Council opted to focus marketing support on the airline program through CBMR, which “is easily measured to find out the success of the program and to give direct feedback to the Town Council on the program’s direct results for business in Mt. Crested Butte.”
But at the county board of commissioners’ working meeting on April 12, Channell suggested that the GCBTA needs to be able to operate independently of fluctuations in support.
“This is an assessment of the TA and not of the LMD,” Channell said. “I hope that there is an ongoing way to deal with any kind of potential fragmentation. Because [fragmentation is] going to happen. These are human institutions, and we’re going to be in favor, then there will be discord, and then we’ll be in favor. We need some [way] to make sure that fragmentation doesn’t happen or doesn’t [inhibit the TA].”
“I think we ought to lay this on the table to the board of directors and the advisory board and hammer it out,” GCBTA executive director Jane Chaney responded.
Channell agreed, suggesting “The last thing we need to do is bury this.”
The Radcliffe Company interviewed 25 individuals, including GCBTA staff, the elected board of directors, the advisory board appointed by local governments and stakeholders, the county commissioners, and county managers to arrive at its findings.
“What we still need to know,” GCBTA co-president Carolyn Riggs said, “is what does Joe Smith on the street think about us?”
And much of the feedback and discussion did focus on board selection and stakeholder participation, highlighting the challenges inherent in balancing expectations and encouraging involvement in a volunteer-based board with very specific selection requirements.
“Bylaws require board members be selected from certain subsets of the industry and county geography,” said Richard Bond, executive director of the Crested Butte/Mt. Crested Butte Chamber of Commerce. “It does not require they have a level of expertise, knowledge or insight that would help to improve deliberations and decision making of the board.”
Add to that the reality that applicants are not necessarily pounding down the doors, and assembling the elected board of directors is not always an easy process.
“I ran the election this time,” Bearth said. “We seek nominations by putting it out to our marketing partners who are members of all three chambers. Over 500 could have been represented, and we had 12 nominations for five seats.”
While the commissioners and the GCBTA board and staff were careful to recognize the qualifications of current board members, they acknowledged that it might be more important to emphasize relevance of board member experience as opposed to the subset of the industry they represent.
“It goes back to the idea that if you’re twisting their arm to get them on the board it’s hard to get them to stay engaged when they are serving their time, because it feels like serving time,” said commissioner Paula Swenson.
It is difficult, the group acknowledged, to encourage more active participation or strategic communication between industry and government leaders or between the GCBTA and the Chamber of Commerce, if the enthusiasm to participate isn’t there. And yet there are some aspects of the Gunnison County structure that may demand increased communication. The study noted that unlike the comparison communities of Durango, Telluride and Steamboat Springs, the GCBTA is unique in that it focuses on marketing rather than sales.
“We affect people’s decision on what destination to choose, not what lodging to book. We get their attention, get them here rather than close the sale,” Chaney said. By design, the Chamber of Commerce provides the latter service, and at present the organizations do not partner on strategy.
“We in Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte set our own strategy with how we serve customers. We don’t take advice from the TA… We don’t really work in a strategic way with the TA,” Bond said.
At this point in time, there is not even cross-over between the two organization’s boards, something the commissioners suggested considering. The first step, however, was to share the report with the TA board so members could discuss the feedback and begin to develop an action plan.
“We took the report to our board of directors at our April meeting and had some good discussion, but we were limited in time so didn’t get all the way through,” said Chaney in a follow up interview. The report went back on the agenda at a board retreat on May 17 and will continue to be the focus at a board meeting on June 7.
“The outcome of the two different retreats will be to have a plan with actionable items which will include how this assessment will be introduced to the community at a large scale down to detailed action plans that the staff and the board will undertake to implement the good ideas that came out of it,” said Chaney.
“The assessment found so many strengths of the tourism association, and there were also some recommendations for us. If you look at it from a 50,000 foot level, basically it said we have a lean mean marketing machine that we may do some light tweaking, and then there are other areas of things that we want to do to further enhance what the organization can do,” she continued.
For now, she said, she and the board appreciate the opportunity to have had the assessment done.
“We’ll be eight years old this July, so it’s a good time to find out how we’re doing,” Chaney
said.
