Attracting dollars to the community
A traditional economic development strategy has been to attract new employers to town. Often tax breaks and incentives have been offered to lure new businesses.
A broader view of this strategy is to consider what brings money into your community. As well as new businesses, it could also be tourism, families paying school fees, commuters, specialist shops, festivals or having a major service that people from outside the community access. These all bring money into the community.
Communities need to explore a wide range of strategies for ‘bringing money in’. Some suggestions are:
- Value add, such as adding tourism to farms
- Offer complementary services in order to ‘piggyback’ on businesses or services that attract customers from outside the community
- Develop ‘experience tourism’ such as historical walks, train trips etc.
- Identify specific services or businesses that are needed in the community and actively lobby them
- Pursue the delivery of services and goods to remote markets such as mail order or teleworking
- Attract ‘passing trade’ such as making your community attractive for traffic to stop in.
Extra resources
- 'The Money Trail' DIY workbook is a tool developed in the UK to help determine how money coming into your community is then spent and re-spent. The workbook is a guide to ‘finding out what's really happening in your local economy, and how you can make it better’.
- The Business Ready Program for Indigenous Tourism is designed to assist existing and start-up Indigenous tourism businesses to develop the business skills and knowledge required to establish and run a commercially viable tourism operation.
- Tourism Queensland offers a range of assistance for potential and current tourism operators, including financing, growing and promoting your tourism business, as well as useful research publications.
