As such, we report annually on our activities to a three-member Board of County Commissioners.  During my first two years here, our focue is been on reporting activities and their results (e.g. number of toll-free and eMail requests for visitor information); which, I'm proud to say, have been generally increasing the last four years.

Two years ago, the Board chair asked about our "results" -- e.g. how many people actually read our literature and actually made an overnight visit to our region because of our "stuff".  So, we developed the mail-out/mail-back survey to people who called our toll-free lines and provided us with addresses to mail them literature as well as an electronic version via eMail to people who selected that route to contact us.

The results were well beyond our expectations -- with both audiences reflecting high percentage figures for getting/reading literature as well as planning/traveling to our region.  The other surprising information from the survey respondents were the many activities during their travels here.  We knew the beach was/is a big draw, but were not aware how high shopping, museums and galleries played into vacationing habits.

We presented the results at the Oregon Coast Rural Tourism Workshops this past February and appear to be the only regional destination marketing organization to accomplish this type of market research effort.

A couple of bragging notes: our total cost was less than $1,000.  We got a number of regional businesses to donate color printed postcards which we bundled into gift sets for the mail survey respondents...as well as asked respondents to pay the return postage.  We also acquired a donated screen saver from a vendor and attached it with a thank you eMail from our web respondents.

Based on results we are now doing our mailings weekly and have developed an HTML version of our lodging properties for immediate response to the eMail folks.

We have also provided copies of our survey materials (eMail and screen savers) to more than two dozen other communities and/or regional DMOs who are planning similar market research efforts.

To Reach Guy please e-mail: coca@newportnet.com
Web Site Locations
https://www.oregon-coast.org/
https://www.newportnet.com/coca/