Recuriting Businesses To Your Community For Modern Economic Developers

The way economic development organizations conduct business is changing rapidly. In the past, administrators of these organizations relied on old school methods to recruit companies into their communities. However, prospective businesses are now demanding consistency and visibility during the business recruitment process. Read on to find out about issues that economic development organizations faced in the past and how new platforms are helping growing communities and relationships in a modern way.

Problems with Economic Development

In the past, economic development organizations relied on antiquated platforms to recruit businesses to their communities. These included trade shows, conferences, and events to attract potential businesses to move to the community based on income benefits, workforce potential and other incentives. This presents a variety of issues including: 
 
High Risk: Your community and business stakeholders are busy and have high expectations for project engagement and results. With the potential of bringing millions of dollars into a community, failing to communicate and collaborate effectively can result in a lost opportunity. 

Timing is Crucial: It can take companies years to relocate. Economic factors are constantly changing. If economic development groups want to speed up their growth, they need a system that can keep up and help push initiatives forward. You can’t rely on manual processes and sifting through emails when it comes to your project goals. 

Data Overload: Today’s economic developers deal with a ton of data collection. Your stakeholders rely on documents, surveys, reports, etc. to demonstrate economic value and win new projects. Inability to share this information effectively and timely often results in slower business recruitment cycles.

Lack of Centralization: Businesses that are considering moving to a new community want to have everything laid out in front of them in one central location. Without this, communication gets lost, deadlines get missed, and goals fall by the wayside. It could kill the opportunity. 

Solution

The role of economic developers is to be a bridge and a resource aligning these stakeholders for success. This continual and collaborative process requires a new way of engagement and enablement for economic development teams. 
 
Centralized Digital Environment:  Everything in one place allows economic developers to share files and resources securely with all businesses and community leaders for a given project. All relevant information is easily accessible so community stakeholders can consume and review on-demand. 

Process Automation: Do more with less: Economic developers want to make the biggest impact possible with the resources they have available. Even a smaller team can make this impact by using automation that provides meaningful engagement to community stakeholders at scale while seamlessly integrating with your other CRMs and platforms. 

Secure Collaboration: Modern businesses have many stakeholders (leadership, investors, consultants,, board members, etc). The key to ensuring value-add and areas of growth for the stakeholders relies on consistent and meaningful collaboration.Giving access and feedback in real time allows your team to reach more stakeholders and speeds up the transaction process. 

How Engage Can Help

Teams leverage Engage for business recruitment, retention, and expansion engagement activities including sharing and collaborating on files, mutual action plans, site selections, incentives, and surveys on a single platform. Powered by proven workflows, integrations with CRM, and messaging platforms ensuring everyone is aligned for success.
 
Economic development is crucial to community growth. ProteusEngage can provide the tools to drive engagement and your community forward. Discover how we help economic development teams communicate and collaborate with your business and community stakeholders at scale.