Change can be scary—but not for Travel Portland’s Tamara Kennedy-Hill, vice president of diversity and community relations. Kennedy-Hill embraces it, which is why she is spearheading the CVB’s latest campaign to pump life back into the city.
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She will play a large part in shaping and executing a comprehensive six-year plan for Travel Portland to become a destination marketing and management organization. The idea is to execute events and conferences in a way that better serves the community as a whole.
When completed, the switch should make Travel Portland and the city it serves stronger. But that doesn’t mean there are not challenges.
“Tension between being an attractive city and a city that is evolving poses the threat that telling authentic stories … is hard when that place is in the middle of transition,” says Kennedy-Hill. Here’s her take on how Portland plans to balance the two.
Can you explain the idea behind Travel Portland’s plan?
About two years ago, Travel Portland embarked upon a strategic planning process to help us think about who we want to be in the future and looked at different destination trends. Our CEO wanted us to be the most innovative DMO in the country. At the same time, we were also looking at how our city is a popular place and how it is growing, beyond just tourism. We are seeing vibrancy in many good ways. A lot of what we promote about place that are the same things that appeal to locals: quality of life, food scene, sustainability. It has also been driving more people to move here, which presents good and bad challenges—we have a bit more congestion and challenges with livability and living cost. The DMMO master plan is about us wanting to be intentional and strategic about how we are actually promoting tourism, meetings and conventions in a manageable way.
Do you think this switch will help attract more groups that make diversity and inclusivity a top priority?
National media has not touted Portland very positively about our racial demographics. We know that while Portland may not be the most racially diverse place, that that narrative does a disservice to the amazing entrepreneurs and professionals of color here. We want to ensure, shape and elevate those stories, but also to collaborate with other stakeholders to make sure Portland is a welcoming and an inclusive place for all, which directly relates to the meetings and conventions world.
Are there any other models of different markets you are working off of as you make the switch to a DMMO? What specific marketing strategies are you hoping to adopt to revitalize the DMMO? Will planners notice much of a difference in working with Travel Portland?
We had to have education sessions for all of our internal teams because as we start to engage our teams we realized it was more of a mindset than a major change. There will be some new product development pieces that will be enhancing the delegate experience. We have been working for a long time on getting a convention center hotel. We would love to have another cool venue for off-site event space—we have been reaching out and talking to developers seeing who is interested in doing projects that are benefiting locals but also benefit meeting planners.
How will you see this plan specifically affect your role as VP of diversity and community relations?
The cultural diversity piece is something we have been very deliberate about for the meetings and conventions audience. We created Prosper Portland: My Peoples Market. It is a marketplace specifically for showcasing business owners and entrepreneurs of color, which we did locally first, but also offer to our business clients to build trust and relationships with diverse communities. Also, we did it to help and identify businesses that are ready to scale and that would be tourism-based businesses. By connecting them, we have been able to bring in our hotel partners and source them for them. We have been cognizant of Portland being a welcoming place for all communities, but we are also being intentional about how we drive economic impact through meetings and conventions so that we can ensure those dollars will support those businesses.
Will there be an effort toward making the marketing strategies/tourism plan a green one?
Sustainability is part of Portland’s DNA. One of the things we want to expand upon, because we have done environmental sustainability really well, was the social equity side of things. We want to be more centered around that third pillar of sustainability. We want to be sure that when meetings and conventions come here that everything is organic and sustainable, but that’s just how we work and we continue to tell that story. The experiential bucket of the plan is really all about our marketing strategy: to be authentic, to incorporate cultural diversity and community engagement. We focus on the neighborhood experience because we know that when people come here they want to go off into the different neighborhood districts and have these unique experiences, and we want to make sure that these districts are going to be ready for the audiences that are going to be coming out there.
