Progress is being made to establish a destination marketing organization (DMO) for Drumheller. The Drumheller Town Council will be presented with a plan to move forward early this year.
The major stakeholders for the DMO, which include the Town of Drumheller, Drumheller and District Chamber of Commerce, Canalta, Royal Tyrrell Museum, Atlas Coal Mine, Passion Play, Rosebud Theatre, and the Dinosaur Trail Golf and Country Club, met recently and are ready to move forward.
“We’re moving ahead with the [Drumheller] marketing consortium acting as an interim DMO,” said Paul Salvatore, Director of Community Services for the Town of Drumheller. “We’ll give a presentation to Council with the range of activities we plan for 2013.”
The focus of the group at the moment is to establish the structure of the organization and get as many businesses involved as possible.
“There will be opportunities for other businesses within the tourism sector in Drumheller to participate. One of our goals is to include more hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, campgrounds, and other operators,” said Salvatore. “We’ll be letting those groups know about opportunities to market with the interim DMO.”
The group will also be looking to hire staff to run the day-to-day operations of the DMO. The Town of Drumheller will reallocate existing funds, currently used for marketing, for administrative costs.
“To be sustainable in the long term, we need to have dedicated staff that can follow through on all the activities to market and promote Drumheller,” said Salvatore.
Work on establishing a DMO began late last year and was one of the major goals highlighted by the Tourism Master Plan report Council received in the spring of 2011.
The purpose of the DMO is to increase the marketability of Drumheller.
“The real opportunity here is for us, as a community to put a strong backing behind promoting Drumheller as a destination. A DMO will help us pool our resources, so we have a much bigger impact getting that message out,” said Salvatore. “Initially we’ll be focused on marketing, but a longer-term goal might be to identify events to help create more traffic in Drumheller.”
The goal would be to have the DMO up and running in the spring of 2013.
Anyone wishing to get involved is encouraged to contact the Economic Development Officer for the Town of Drumheller, Bob Cromwell, at 403-823-1320.