It’s been over a year since we started southwestraleigh.com and we’ve made a lot of progress. Anthony McLeod, Joe Boisvert, and myself have enjoyed learning about many of the great people, places, and events in Raleigh’s Creative District. Our audience has grown and we continue to attract great talent to contribute to this community’s presence. How did we get to here and where are we going?
I gave a presentation [PDF] to the Southwest Citizens Advisory Council (SWCAC) on January 9 and District D Neighborhood Alliance (DDNA) on January 21 on The Evolution of Raleigh’s Creative District. I thought I would share the presentation and my thoughts with our online community.
As many of you now, the editors decided to focus the site on highlighting the assets of the Creative District. For this community, Creative is homonym of sorts:
- In the literal sense, this is Raleigh’s home of the “creative class”—the artists, craftsmen and tradesmen, thinkers, educators, innovators, designers, professionals, entrepreneurs, etc.
- The second meaning is a clever, yet astute acronym that includes Southwest Raleigh’s Communities, Recreation, Education, Arts, Technology, Innovation, Vision, and Entertainment
For over three years, I blogged and gathered information from my neighborhood on lineberry.org. Over time, I realized that I was blogging about things well beyond the immediate community. There was data and analytics to prove it. In December of 2010, Anthony, Joe, and I met to discuss the opportunity of doing a regional blog for Southwest Raleigh. If I decided to go in this direction, I wasn’t going to do it alone. We decided to give it a try.
We knew there as an economic development and branding study in the works for Southwest Raleigh. We also knew it was going to be a while before it would get started, and even longer to get the results of the study. So southwestraleigh.com was born with our commitment and the intent to highlight the great things happening in the Creative District.
Over the summer of 2011, the economic development and branding study got approval from City Council and the partnership between the City, NC State, and citizens was given the go ahead. The study should be kicking off in early 2012. We want our efforts to compliment that study.
Our goal for the first year was to have one new post every Monday through Thursday. We achieved that goal and published 300 articles in 2010. How? We gathered support from neighborhood leaders, Citizen Advisory Council chairs, and other contributors interested in this project. We met with the Downtown Raleigh Alliance (DRA) to be clear that we wanted to amplify their efforts and compliment (not compete with) the great things happening in downtown Raleigh.
Over the course of the year, we realized that promoting the great things happening in Southwest Raleigh was a correct assumption. Much of the content we published was getting good web traffic.
During the presentation, I showed our audiences how we publish our content using an open source content management system called WordPress. I gave them a glimpse at our publishing calendar made available to our contributors. This allows us to coordinate publishing and show where we have open slots.
After publishing content, the work isn’t done. We have a distribution strategy that includes social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter. We leverage RSS (really simple syndication) and send out an email every Friday to several neighborhood email lists in the Creative District.
We shared some of out web traffic statistics highlighting the 45,000 page views from 2011. We also gathered almost 400 Twitter followers and gained over 200 Facebook fans. All this with no advertising, just word of mouth.
Then, I shared some of our success stories dating back to the tornado coverage from April where we saw a good spike in traffic. One of my favorite stories includes CityFabric. We interviewed Matt Tomasul to share his story. Shortly after that, we were contacted by the N&O to get Tomasul’s contact information. Then, about two weeks after our interview ran, CityFabric was on the front page of the Midtown.
Over the course of the year, we added two regular columns to the blog. First, The Best of Southwest, written by Amy Genovesi Howard, highlights three restaurants in the Creative District each week. We found Kris Montgomery who was blogging about various Raleigh parks she was visiting. We invited her to post on the site and now we have a Parks in the Creative District feature each week.
I concluded the presentation with ideas on how people could contribute. Beyond the to-do list we have posted for community contributions, I encouraged people to think about places they love and people they know. What topics are they experts in? It could be an event they know about or help out with. It could be something in their community. Or it could be something about a new development or a business coming to the district.
The possibilities are endless. And we can’t stress enough that this blog is for the community, by the community.
If you’d like to contribute, contact us and let us know how we can help. As far as where we’re going, look for a future post outlining our goals for 2012.