Elaine Bedel, President of the Indiana Destination Development Corporation joins us to share a brand new advertising campaign available to every business, local government and nonprofit organization in Indiana.
Find the In Indiana Campaign Kits Here
Here is the transcript from Elaine’s presentation:
Ryan: So now, as we continue Independent Retailer Month, I would like to introduce everyone to our speaker today, and Elaine and I met recently, as we are both Rotarians, Elaine is a member of the Rotary Club of Indianapolis, I myself am a member of the Indianapolis East Rotary Club.
Ryan: And it’s great to always know the professionals within the organization and the great things that they’re doing in our community and around the world. And Elaine is definitely doing that today.
Ryan: Elaine is with the Indiana Destination Development Corporation, which is a reasonably new agency, created by the State of Indiana to help promote all the great things that are happening here within our state, both to people traveling here and considering making Indiana their new home.
Ryan: So, everyone, let’s please give Elaine Bedel a hand, and Elaine you have the floor, and you can now share your screen if you’d like.
Elaine: Great thank you, thank you.
Elaine: Nice to see everyone. I’m going to be talking a lot about Indiana and what we’re trying to do here. And if I heard right, I think Brett, Jesse and Jay are not in Indiana, if that’s correct, and so you may not find as quite as interesting, but hopefully you will. And maybe it’ll make you want to move to Indiana.
Elaine: That’s what we’d love to have, that it gets you here.
Elaine: So, I am going to share my screen and let’s see. There we go. Thank you, OK, we’re ready, I hope so. I’ll keep this moving.
Elaine: We are the Indiana Destination Development Corporation. As Ryan mentioned and just to give a little history, we are relatively new. In 2017 there was a task force created by the legislature to determine what to do in the area of tourism.
Elaine: We had an Indiana Office of Tourism Development and this, and what actually the task force did, and I happened to serve on that task force was, we looked at all 50 states, how tourism was organized and how it was funded.
Elaine: So, the task force ended up recommending that we create a quasi-government entity and I’ll explain that a little bit more for the area of tourism, and that was a bill passed in 2019 by the legislature with creating the Indiana Destination Development Corporation as a replacement for the Indiana Office of Tourism Development and as a quasi-government entity. With the starting date of July 1st, 2020.
Elaine: The governor at the time, I was, had been appointed by the governor to be President of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation in November. He asked if I’d be willing to help start this new entity, and so, on November 11th of 2019, I became the Secretary and CEO of the Indiana Destination Development Corporation.
Elaine: If you, if you may remember what happened right after that. We had COVID. So, interesting to try and start a business during COVID, because you know the whole state just sort of clamped down.
Elaine: It was like you know, don’t do anything. Don’t- don’t come. Don’t spend any money. Don’t hire any people. So, we’ve got a lot of research done, and I’ll share some of that with you as well, but we did finally get it going, but our mission had been greatly expanded from just tourism and it’s now to promote, brand, and tell Indiana’s authentic story to attract and retain talent, students, business, and visitors. In other words, it got to be a much bigger mission.
Elaine: It’s important to get people here obviously, but we want to take it a little bit farther to entice them to want to move their business here. Start a business here. Come work for a business here, just to live here in Indiana. So, that’s kind of where we ended up going with this.
Elaine: So, what’s a quasi-government entity and why was that so important? It’s a, it’s an entity that’s more flexible than a full government agency, in other words. We can work with the private sector and partner with the private sector on different projects a lot easier than, than a full agency can.
Elaine: We are governed by a 7-member board and the Lieutenant governor is one of those board members and she chairs the board, Lieutenant Governor Suzanne Crouch.
Elaine: We also are allowed to have a foundation, and that foundation is a non-government entity, but it is a public benefit corporation. In other words, it’s organized for a public purpose and its sole purpose is supporting the mission of the Indiana Destination Development Corporation.
Elaine: So, we can gather contributions from businesses, individuals, foundations, associations, anybody into the foundation. But the money can only be spent on supporting the mission of the IDDC. That’s why we’re called a supporting organization.
Elaine: So, we have a separate 7-member board that governs the foundation, and again the Lieutenant Governor, Suzanne Crouch, just chairs that board for us as well. So that’s a little bit about how we’re organized and one of the things that we did.
Elaine: A lot of during that first year was research. We had image studies as indicated on the slide, we interviewed talent recruiters with corporations and national recruiters and we had focus groups around the country just to kind of get a feel for what’s happening out there? What do people think of Indiana?
Elaine: And the big conclusion came out is Indiana is not very well known outside of our borders, and we know that if you had no connection in other words, you’ve never visited here, but you didn’t go to school here, you don’t have friends or relatives here, your perception is luckily not necessarily negative.
Elaine: It’s neutral, they just don’t know anything about, and sometimes, I, misinformation and no information is pretty prevalent with the focus group that that we did in Atlanta. And when we do these focus groups we have, you know, four or five people in a room, and then there’s a facilitator asking questions and the requirement to be part of a focus group was you had to be willing to move for a job that was, that was part of the criteria for being in a focus group, and the facilitator always started with talking about the Midwest in total.
Elaine: And then started kind of gearing down to talk more about Indiana and you know, so one of the questions that sticks in my mind is, you know, if you were going to move somewhere in the Midwest, where would you go and an individual again out of Atlanta said, “oh, I’d probably move to Indiana, that’s the closest to New York”.
Elaine: We’re going, I don’t think so, yeah, got your geography, a little confused there. Another person also is part of the Atlanta one, one of the Atlanta, so, we had several focus groups, there’s four or five people in each of the cities. And she was talking about weather and she said she would not move to Indiana, way too cold, she’d rather go to Chicago.
Elaine: So, it’s like OK, again, doesn’t make sense, because they just don’t have any information or misinformation. Now I don’t know in that case if they mix up Indianapolis and Minneapolis, which is again much farther north, but for some reason they just don’t know a lot about us.
Elaine: So, we did focus groups in Atlanta, Chicago, and San Francisco. And one that stuck out in San Francisco. There you had to also be in the tech industry and willing to move for a job. And this one gentleman said, well, there’d be no reason to move to Indiana. There would be nothing for him there.
Elaine: So, I’m texting the facilitator, saying, ask him, he knows that Salesforce has put their, you know, second headquarters in Indianapolis and he didn’t have any idea. And here he’s in technology, but he didn’t have any idea. And part of the problem is we haven’t told our story.
Elaine: We haven’t told people about these things and let him know what great assets we have here and the governor also talks about the fact he was in a conversation and someone brought up Purdue and they’re going Purdue. That’s in Indiana. This, followed by Notre Dame that’s in Indiana, so again, these great resources, but nobody connects them to our state.
Elaine: They may know about it, but they don’t connect and my own personal experiences. Someone told me that Eli Lilly was located in New York. They were headquartered in New York, not the case.
Elaine: Founded, started, still in Indianapolis as their headquarters. So again, it’s just that, that lack of information, again, because we haven’t told our story. Right?
Elaine: So, when we look at this strategic plan then, for the IDDC, it’s really to help attract talent, so help all those corporations that are having difficulties determining what the barriers are and how can we help them, when they have that candidate on the phone who says, you know, I really like the job, but why would I come to Indiana?
Elaine: The other thing is to retain our graduates. Uhm, let me look here for a second. Yeah, retain our graduates.
Elaine: Indiana has a lot of great colleges. In fact, we always rank in the top five states of net inbound students coming from other places to our state, and that’s pretty incredible, but we have, you know, 30 colleges and 7, 30 private colleges and seven state universities with lots of campuses, so we get a lot of students here.
Elaine: We get in here for four to six years, we’ve got to give them a reason to stay right here, and we know that internships are important. We know that getting him experience off campus to understand what life would be here, that quality of life, quality of place that we can share.
Elaine: So those are some of the things that we’re working on with our colleges and universities to, to accomplish that. The internships are really important, because we have found that students that have internships, 80% of them are offered a job from that employer. Full time job. 70% of the interns accept that job, so doing the math, that means 56% of all interns stay where they had their internship.
Elaine: So, it’s really important that we get our industry, our businesses, in Indiana large and small to create those internships and bring that talent in. And then secondly to make sure they understand the lifestyle that they could potentially have here in Indiana, which is, you know, we’ve got such a great lifestyle here, that most people, when they get here, they’re amazed. And they, they never want to leave.
Elaine: And that’s the other part of converting visitors, you know. Again, we get a lot of visitors here, through the conventions that come particularly to Indianapolis, but also to Fort Wayne and Evansville and, and all over the state, Terre Haute, where they have convention centers to hold those types of meetings and we need to take an opportunity while they’re here to kind of again compare it to where they’re from, maybe in the quality of life, but also the cost of living, and what it’s like to buy a house here.
Elaine: I don’t know if anybody ever looks at the New York Times, but on Sunday, in the real estate section they always said, what can you get for $1,000,000? What can you get for $300,000 and they usually show three different states. And Indiana is in there periodically, and one that I remember, is that they could get a great Victorian home, down, that was like 9000 square feet, compared to something that they could get and I can’t remember the numbers now in, in, in New York or someplace else. Which were, you know, a small condo for the same price and it’s those kinds of comparisons.
Elaine: That we want people to become aware of and, and let them know those kinds of things and then enhancing Hoosier pride. That’s a big part of it as well. We’ve always been called tumble Hoosiers.
Elaine: You know, we don’t, we, they willingly tell our story, but Hoosier Hospitality is really true and you know, I often thought, isn’t everybody kind of like us when people go visit and people who travel a lot say absolutely not. It’s very different here, that people genuinely want to help and want to connect and want to make sure that their visit or their stay, or them coming as a new resident, is an enjoyable experience.
Elaine: We started doing a video series and I don’t have any of them here in this presentation, but they’re called Hoosier By Choice and you can just Google Hoosier By Choice and you’ll see all of the videos that we’ve put out since early last year, and it’s the stories of people, they’re like 90-second videos, telling why they came to Indiana and why they love it.
Elaine: And every time it’s like they’ve discovered this place and you know they came here maybe for a job. But, now love it, because how easy it was to get connected, that Hoosier Hospitality is really true, that people are so kind and open and willing to talk and help connect.
Elaine: And so, if you want to go to hoosiersbychoice.com and just play a few of those videos, it does warm your heart to know what other people love about your state. And we hope those that aren’t from Indiana will go there in particular and find out why they should move here.
Elaine: OK, now I wanted was going to get into a little bit more about the messaging campaign back on June 8 we presented a new message. Indiana has really not had a message campaign for quite a few years. Some of you from Indiana may recall there was Honest to Goodness, Indiana. There was Wonder Indiana, Start Your Engines or Rev Your Engines or something like that at one time.
Elaine: Those were all taglines, and you know, you either love him or you hate him and it really wasn’t something that we wanted to get back into. And most people, as I’ve been talking, that we were developing this new, they would say, well, don’t do anything like that.
Elaine: So, what we’ve come up with is an identifier to say, you’re part of Indiana. And you create your own headline, so that’s what I want to kind of share with you today, is our- uh oh my, my, OK, let’s now, now my, my arrows aren’t working.
Ryan: Elaine, click on the image again then.
Elaine: There we go. You were right. Thank you. I had moved to the other screen with my, my cursor, so our new campaign message is what I want to show you.
Elaine: My message, it’s two parts. The first part is the identifier and this is it. It looks simple, but Indiana is one of the states that has IN as its, as its abbreviation. It’s a word, right? In, and it can be used in so many ways.
Elaine: So, IN Indiana is the identifier and what we want people to do is pick this up and then create their new, their own headline.
Elaine: So, it can be a lot of different things and it can apply in so many different ways and that’s what we loved about it. So, we use it as more to discover in Indiana. So again, calling visitors to come visit Indiana, there’s more to discover here or life is better in Indiana talking about our quality of life.
Elaine: Build your future In Indiana, come get your education here. Come stay here, come build your company here, come build your career future here, so there’s lots of ways that it can be used.
Elaine: And so, on June 8 we presented this in a press conference and I will tell you, we have not had anybody not like it so far. Now if you don’t like it, maybe people don’t tell me. I can get that too.
Elaine: I’m not going to tell you if I don’t like it, but I’d love your thoughts and opinions because what we want to do is to get everyone to use it.
Elaine: Here’s a way that our Natural- Department of Natural Resources, DNR is using it, IN Indiana, you know, Retreat Outside in Indiana, Experience Nature in Indiana, Explore the State Parks in Indiana.
Elaine: I mean, it can fit in so many different ways. We worked with the City of Evansville, and Evansville for four or five years has used the E is for Everyone, it’s sort of been their, their campaign, it works perfectly, E is for Everyone in Indiana.
Elaine: And so, they’re using this, you know on their website and their advertising, and different places. So, just so many different ways that it can be implemented.
Elaine: I’m going to show you a few more examples as well. Come visit Knightstown, so you can go from a city that’s fairly large, you know, Evansville, to a town, a rural community, and of course they have the Hoosier gym there, where Hoosiers was filmed.
Elaine: But it’s easy to say, Visit Knightstown in Indiana, and actually they came out with their own little tagline, like right before we, we did this and I think it’s, Hoosiers made here.
Elaine: Well, the movie was made here, works perfectly. Hoosiers made here in Indiana, so they were excited when they saw this.
Elaine: And university, at the Indiana State University, they have had a campaign for their students called Discover your advantage, and they immediately picked it up with, Discover your advantage in Indiana, obviously on the mobile device as well as their website and other places that they’re marketing it.
Elaine: Hanover College is small private college versus one of our, our state universities, Find your place in Indiana.
Elaine: Pursue your passion in Indiana, so again, it can fit in so many different ways and the beauty is if you don’t like it, you change your headline.
Elaine: You know it, it can be flexible in that way.
Elaine: Visit Indy, which is our largest destination marketing organization, they market, really central IN, Indianapolis, in particular, so this is an ad that’s coming out in a local magazine, the Indianapolis Monthly. So, it’s, Indy in Indiana.
Elaine: You know, Your Love Indiana Moment Awaits, Summer Moments Away, Family fun in Indiana, where they’re trying to market the Children’s Museum and, Adventures await in Indiana, so again, they’re actively using this this way. And of course, this is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which is where we did our press conference.
Elaine: Back home again, was their motto for this year’s 500. If you were around Indiana, you probably heard that several times. And it works perfectly with In Indiana, and unfortunately, we hadn’t released this in time to get them to use it.
Elaine: But Doug Boles, who kind of runs that, thought of 1000 different ways that they could, they could use that and plan on doing that as well. It’s already in their social media, but Start Your Engines in Indiana, so we’re looking forward to how they’re going to be using it in the future.
Elaine: And small businesses or any business you, you could just use, Proud business owner in Indiana.
Elaine: But you could also use minority owned business, woman owned business, veteran owned business, and it fits nicely with that, but again you can create your own unique one as well.
Elaine: And so, here’s just some examples pulled together, More to Discover, Experience nature, etc.
Elaine: Tell your story. Find your seat at the table, Stay Awhile, Boiler Up, for all our Purdue graduates.
Elaine: Visit the dunes. Dunes National Park up north. Build your legacy, free to be, life is better, so there’s so many different ways that it can be used.
Elaine: All right, ready. Can you hear it?
Speaker in Video: In Indiana. Big thrills are state tradition. Here, get lost and take a hike. Our weekend plans and welcome mats are a genuine invitation.
Speaker in Video: In Indiana, our downtowns and our small towns have the same amount of heart and the moments that mean the most here, just happen.
Elaine: Oh, sorry about that. I think I moved.
Speaker in Video: There’s more to discover in Indiana. Get in at VisitIndiana.com.
Elaine: So that’s the video that we put up put together for, obviously, visitors to come discover more.
Elaine: I’m sorry I probably ruined the effect for you by having so many technical difficulties, but you’ll be seeing that around as well. Oh, there it’s going again.
Speaker in Video: In Indiana. Big thrills are state tradition. Here, get lost and take a hike. Our weekend plans and welcome mats are a genuine invitation.
Speaker in Video: In Indiana, our downtowns and our small towns have the same amount of heart and the moments that mean the most here, just happen.
Speaker in Video: There’s more to discover in Indiana. Get in at VisitIndiana.com
Elaine: So, there’s kind of a collage of everything we talked about, but did anybody recognize that last scene with all the white sand?
Ryan: Isn’t that Dunes National Park?
Elaine: It is. We have one of the best beaches in the country, if not the world. And very, you know, not enough people know about it, and it’s beautiful. But, and people can’t believe the dunes. I, you know, I grew up in southern Indiana, so northern Indiana, you know on the lake MI shoreline.
Elaine: I’m not, I wasn’t there that often, so dunes, in my mind were just these big piles of sand. Trees grow on these things and they’re huge and it’s just amazing. It actually, there’s a, the ecosystem up there has more variety of vegetation and animals and birds and all this kind of thing, than in a lot of places in the world, and it’s, it’s pretty amazing.
Elaine: But nobody really realizes that. So, you can see this one in the South Shore. There’s another picture. See the trees growing in the sand. Dunes at Lake Michigan.
Elaine: But here’s kind of a collage of a bunch of different things that you should be seeing that are being used right now out around Indiana. So, some ideas so.
Nathan: I’ll gladly give you ours, we’ve been using it, too, Elaine, so.
Elaine: You’ve been using what?
Nathan: The new logo, we did it, rolled it out the first day at.
Elaine: You know what, I can’t see who’s speaking.
Nathan: Oh, Nathan from Indiana Film Makers Network.
Elaine: Oh wonderful, thank you Nathan. That is terrific in Indiana. I mean, Filmmaking in Indiana.
Nathan: That’s what we do.
Elaine: That’s terrific.
Nathan: Cinematic Arts in Indiana, Indiana Film Makers in Indiana.
Elaine: And that’s exactly we want everybody to do. There is my side, which is full buy in by all stakeholders, businesses, colleges, associations, municipalities, everybody. Because it’s easy. And we, the intent of this was not too change anything you’re already doing to market yourself, but to just allow this to compliment and to again say that you’re part of Indiana.
Elaine: So, as I’ve been talking before, we put this out to the world, you know, just put on your website, down the corner on your brochure, or put it on the sides of your trucks or your vehicles, or on your town’s water tower.
Elaine: And so, we had a lot of, we were talking this up quite a bit before we, we put it out there, but that’s what we’re hoping we can, we can get done.
Elaine: And you might wonder where you can find it so you can find it at VisitIndiana.com/toolkits is one way to go there and you’re going to find the artwork, which is free.
Elaine: You know we had, we had a couple of mayors say, OK, we’d like to do this, how much is it going to cost us? Nothing. This is absolutely free. All the artwork is done. And you can use it and there’s templates for emails and, and other things available.
Elaine: Cut the color palette and the fonts and a quick start option. So, I’m going to see if I can go there.
Elaine: Is this going to work? I clicked on it, it’s loading.
Ryan: So far, so good.
Elaine: Yeah, just show you what we have to do here. OK, why is it taking so long to load?
Nathan: Yeah, it’s really user friendly.
Nathan: Uh, I suggest I, I go around Lafayette, and we work with the local visitor center here in Lafayette to try to get local businesses to use it.
Nathan: There’s it’s really simple. They, the only things were some of them just finding what works best for your, what your purpose is.
Elaine: Oh darn, well, it says I can’t get there from here, but thank you for that. Uhm, what if I try it a different way?
Ryan: In the chat I just put the link that that forwards to, the VisitIndiana.com/toolkits goes to VisitIndiana.com/campaign-kits.
Elaine: Right, and when you get there, you should see options. There’s a general toolkit, there’s one for universities, is one for businesses, and there’s one for, which one am I missing, let me see. I actually wanted to have this pulled up over here.
Elaine: OK, I wonder if this will work, OK, can you see it now? Campaign kits?
Elaine: OK, so when you get there, you’ll find general, municipal, business and university, and if you click on the business one, we’ll see if this continues to work. Alright, you come down here, talks about how to use the guide if you want to access, the kit in the templates and here’s the colors and type in the pillars and language and that type of thing.
Elaine: What you’ll have to do is, kind of fill this in first ’cause we, we need to know who’s, who’s using it. So, I’m just going to put my name in. Here I’ve done this again. It’ll probably start kicking me out of the system.
Elaine: And download files.
Elaine: And what I really wanted to show you, then you’re going to see, you know, the logos that you can download, but here’s a Quick start. If you just customize our logo, now you can go here and, Nathan, this may not have been available to you. We’ve added it recently.
Nathan: Yeah, this came later.
Elaine: Yeah, and all you need to do is put your personal statement here. You know if you want to do, Create your Film. And you say update the message, it goes right there. And, if you like what you’ve done, you hit download and it’s yours.
Elaine: So, it can be really easy, you know. Find your, update the message so.
Nathan: Yeah, nice, yeah.
Elaine: So it it yeah so, Nathan, this wasn’t available, we decided.
Nathan: No, no. I got an early thing too from Recreate Media so I was right, right on it and I supported from day one and we, we shared across our platforms for the rollout of this in, Uh, June.
Elaine: Thank you, thank you, that, that, that’s exactly what we needed people to do, so we’re working with a lot of mayors but also associations to try and get the word to all their members.
Elaine: So, this is a great opportunity that Ryan gave me to try and share this with you and, and give you some ideas of what you can do. But we do want everybody to use this, so let’s see if I back out of this, where I go to? Ah, we’re back right? See my? Terrific.
Elaine: But to get everybody to use it and what what does success look like?
Elaine: It’s a really big megaphone, you know, we really need everybody to say that this is, we’re part of Indiana because I need to build this, this base of knowledge and those people who are outside of Indiana.
Elaine: That’s what Indiana has to offer, and I think once we do that, we’ll start getting some real momentum of getting people to understand this is a great place to be. So, we need everyone to see that consistent message so that we can create that positive perception out there as opposed to what is right now.
Elaine: Luckily, just a neutral perception, so we need to do our best and all of you can be part of, part of doing that.
Elaine: So, get in, in Indiana.
Find the In Indiana Campaign Kits Here
