PreservationNation

Attendees at the Michigan Main Street Center’s annual conference in September got a sneak preview of a short video that captures the importance of our downtowns. The video went viral with a flurry of tweets,  Facebook postings and e-mail forwards as people were enthusiastically embracing Michigan’s pitch that Main Streets are the heart and soul of our towns and that we need to support local businesses in order to keep downtowns viable and vibrant. Joe Borgstrom, the director of the Specialized Technical Assistance & Revitalization Strategy Division for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority, shares with us his inspiration for creating this piece.
– Andrea L. Dono, associate editor, National Trust Main Street Center

Written by Joe Borgstrom

In all honesty, it started with a conversation at the 2009 National Main Streets Conference between me, Arkansas’ Cary Tyson, and Ohio’s Jeff Siegler (directors of their state’s respective Main Street programs). We were talking about the need for somebody to do a video that told people, in a light-hearted way, about the importance of supporting Main Street districts. We didn’t want to hit people over the head with it, but simply wanted to remind people of the many reasons to shop their local Main Streets. The conversation ended there and we all went about the rest of the conference.

A week or two later, I came across a video entitled Built to Last. It promotes some of the ideas from the Charter of New Urbanism. It’s hip and funny and it had a tremendous run on social media. As of this writing, the video has well over 70,000 hits on YouTube. I thought to myself, “This is exactly what we should do.” I fired off the link to the video to Cary and Jeff. Both agreed this was in the vein we were talking about.

Within a few days, I sat down with our Promotions, Arts & Culture Specialist Jodie Willobee, MSHDA’s communications manager, and several members of our marketing firm (a FANTASTIC group named Pace & Partners), to have our first project meeting. I’m not entirely sure what the folks from Pace & Partners first thoughts about this project were, but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of: “These people are nuts.”

We must have gone through a dozen creative ideas in a matter of a half hour. Finally, the folks from Pace were able to corral us into thinking through what were the most important points we wanted to talk about. We came to one central theme. If people wanted to save their Main Streets, they had to support them financially. The team from Pace were given the task of coming up with a creative concept around that with one caveat: Whatever the creative pitches they were going to make, we didn’t want to people to feel like they’d been beaten into submission by a “Thou Shall Buy Local” edict. We wanted to inform and inspire, not lecture.

A few weeks later, the team from Pace came back to pitch ideas. They gave us three options. The one we all collectively liked the best was the concept aptly named, “Open.” The concept was simple. Tell the story through various “We’re Open” signs. The script was written brilliantly by Pace & Partners’ namesake, Dennis Pace. Though he, Jodie, and I went round and round about some tone and specific words, Dennis’ flair for writing is one of the things that makes this video so powerful.

One of the things we wanted to do in this video was to feature all the great communities that were a part of the Michigan Main Street program. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget that would’ve afforded ALL of our communities to be involved due to the time and distance between all of them. We narrowed down the candidates to the four Main Street downtowns that we filmed: Marshall, Howell, Niles, and Lansing’s Old Town.

We sent our crews out to film and take pictures of these communities, the businesses, residents, and other things about them that make them great Main Streets. All of the Main Street managers were fantastic in lining up folks for shots. Marshall’s Diane Larkin even pulled people into stores who were walking by. Niles’ Lisa Croteau appears in the video as the “Come on In” lady. They were all invaluable to the process.

Last, but certainly not least, the production crew and staff of Pace & Partners and Such Video put a whole lot of time in on the project. Notably, Christina Jackson, Rob Wesson, and our irrepressible account manager Debbie Horak, who had the unenviable task of trying to herd the cats as we all wanted to go in our own creative directions.

The story of this video is not over though. Pace & Partners, recognizing the situation many of our Main Street coordinating and local programs are in, asked our permission to use our video as the basis to create a more generic version (at their cost) to share with ALL Main Street communities. At last word, this video is two weeks away from release. We hope people are impacted by the video. We hope it makes people think a bit differently about how and where they spend their money, what it means to the local economy, and that it helps them to make a choice to Buy Main Street.

Joe Borgstrom is the director of the Specialized Technical Assistance & Revitalization Strategy Division for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under main street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.