Episode 31

Claire Carlin, Vice President of Partnerships and Alliance with Destination DC

Engaging Membership

You’re listening to Event CEO, a podcast for executives who are looking to maximize their event ROI through business strategy, technology, and innovation.

Rebecca Linder: Hello and welcome to the Event CEO podcast. Thank you for listening and sharing part of your day with us We’re truly honored and grateful as we know your time is precious. I’m Rebecca Linder, CEO of Linder Global Events and today we’re so pleased to have on the show Claire Carlin, Vice President of partnerships and alliances for Destination DC. Welcome Claire.

Claire: Hi Rebecca, I’m so pleased to be here.

Rebecca: It’s great to have you. So, Claire and I have known each other for a long time. She is now at Destination DC. And as some of you know, we interviewed your President and CEO Elliot Ferguson, however, we’d like to interview you today around the work that you do at that great organization. So, why don’t you start out with the role that you play and how it fits into the mission.

Claire: Right, totally. Thanks! I have a terrific job celebrating the success of our city and helping to facilitate that. A reminder to listeners about what Destination DC is, we are the official destination marketing organization for the city, or the convention and visiting bureau. Our job is to market Washington DC for meetings, conventions, events and leisure travel. Our audience is anyone coming out of the city to the city. So, fundamentally, we are an economic development agency. We are looking for money, money spent outside Washington to be spent inside the city, and how that contributes to the function of the city.

Rebecca: And the role you play in all of that?

Claire: So, my job as partnerships and alliances as you said, what that means is the revenue generating programs for Destination DC. So, membership and engaging local businesses in the tourism economy and sponsorship, so how we work with businesses who want a deeper relationship and more benefits around that. Our work complements the other teams at Destination DC. We have a very robust marketing department which controls our corporate

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communications and B2B and B2C messaging. Then we have two very externally related teams, tourism, which is for marketing and leisure travel, and convention sales, which markets for business and meeting travel. The four teams work together but my job is to engage and support the local businesses.

Rebecca: Talk to us about – so, part of our audience is interested in how you keep a membership engaged. You have a big membership, which is how big?

Claire: We have about 1,000 members of businesses.

Rebecca: How do you keep them engaged? Then, we’ll segue a little bit into the most recent event you had and how that impacted your membership.

Claire: There are a lot of ways. We are really fortunate to be in the midst of a very robust and thriving economy and a great city. So, those 1,000-member business are people who touch travel and tourism, it’s hotel and accommodations, it’s restaurants, it’s attractions, things like museums, tour operators, providers, and then it is convention service providers. Like the EV company and the transportation company. All of them participate with Destination DC because it’s good for their business. It’s not a philanthropic investment, it’s not an obligation. They join with us because we provide resources to them that help them grow their business. We do that through connections, that’s connections to clients that are coming into town, that’s connections to one another, and an example of that would be at a member event. We host a couple member events a month generally, there’s a blend of education and networking and social activities. I saw happen at the coffee bar one time, somebody that owns a small cruise company, so boats on the Potomac, meet someone who works in logistical support. They had this mash-up which happened at the coffee bar and one said “Wow, my people might want to come on your boat.” And the other said “Wow, I’d love to have your people on my boat. Why don’t I take your people on a cruise next week?” And so, they are working together as a result of that.

Rebecca: So, for the audience. There’s two members, really. There’s the event audience from the event world, and there’s the corporate environment that uses events to support. How do you suggest those two audiences engage with an organization like --

Claire: like Destination DC?

Rebecca: Right. How do they best take advantage?

Claire: It depends a little on who the business is. Everybody has a different experience with Destination DC that works for them. For example, there is a walking tour company that works with us, and they have told us that their number 1 website referral source is washington.org.

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Our website is working and they are getting click throughs. So, they are exclusively working for us because of the benefits of digital marketing.

Rebecca: Okay

Claire: For other people, like the cruise boat guy, it’s really about interpersonal relationships. They go to all the events to meet each other. There are people like the hotel community that work for us because our convention sales team is selling their hotels directly, they’re participating in room blocks so that when the big convention comes to town, they can have those people stay. We have tremendous data across the industry that tells hotel trends so they can understand what the occupancy looks like, how we’re selling room in 2020, how they can plan their business accordingly. Depending on the kind of business you are, there are a lot of different ways you can see benefits from Destination DC.

Rebecca: OK, can I assume that every city has a version of Destination DC?

Claire: Yes. Largely.

Rebecca: So, there’s a big advantage to getting involved?

Claire: Yes, and across the industry those destination marketing organizations are very collaborative. We share information, we share best practices, we’re competitive for meetings and events, but we also work together. The meetings rotate around big cities, and we say, oh they were here and now they’re there, what did you learn about each of these and how to best serve this particular client.

Rebecca: That’s cool. How does the corporate client rely on Destination DC or a version of that in any city?

Claire: So, say that I’m bringing Claire’s Cookies and all of my service providers to a city for a convention and there are 20,000 of us that work on Claire’s Cookies.

Rebecca: Where’s Claire’s Cookies? I wish they were here! I want a cookie!

Claire: I want a cookie! I would contact the Destination marketing organization and one person from the sales team would work with me to help me find the right resources, the dates of the convention center, to help me understand what the room rates are, what hotels are available, how my attendees get around. So, on the front end, I have someone who helps me negotiate the purchasing of the space and experiences for my delegates. Once I’ve decided that Washington is where I want to be, someone else from Destination DC is my complementary meeting planner from the destination that makes connections, facilitates site visits, so I have

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someone to take me around to visit places where I might have my board meeting, where I might do a pre-weekend retreat for families. Destination DC brings all those resources for free to the client. It’s for free because our city benefits on the other side from all of their delegate spending.

Rebecca: It’s an incredible service.

Claire: Thanks, I think so. My colleagues are pretty good at it.

Rebecca: Yes, they are. So, you talk about bringing things, it’s free because your role and goal is to enhance the economy, in DC in particular. So, we just had a big event – IPW. Would love to hear a bit about how, what that meant for the city and what you had to do from a sponsorship perspective – what was your mandate and how you went about it.

Claire: For sure. A piece of context. An enormous amount of money comes to Washington from visitors, and that’s just over $7 Billion a year. That – it’s incredible. It’s a little hard to get your brain around the scale of that. That comes from about 22 million visitors. The vast majority of that is what they spend on their lodging, then the taxes that are paid on that help fuel the city. That’s where Destination DC gets its budget. It’s important to know that to know that visitors are paying for the marketing services of the city, not residents. So, marketing, travel, and tourism is purely a net gain, everyone benefits. It costs us as tax payers no additional money.

Rebecca: Wow. That’s a good thing to know.

Claire: That’s pretty cool.

Rebecca: Yeah it is.

Claire: The balance of that money, or the partnerships and team that I work with, we raise some of our operating budget and the rest comes from the hotel tax. To your point about IPW, we had to work to raise some funds to put that on. For listeners, IPW is a big business travel industry conference. It is hosted by US travel, the national advocacy organization for our industry. IPW is simply an acronym but has this global brand recognition. The audience at IPW are international travel buyers. They come once a year to an American city. An international travel buyer might be someone who is selling high-end travel experiences for Chinese travelers who want to come to DC, who sells tour groups to students from Germany, who sells senior citizen packages from Italy. Those kinds of people are who the customers are. They come once a year to a domestic city and everyone who has something to sell them comes to court them. Washington had never hosted I before. We won the bid several years ago and it was kind of like being an Olympic city, so we had all these obligations about how to showcase our city. Washington DC city government

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put up half of the funding, so 3.5 million dollars came from the district government of a total of 7-million-dollar budget, and we thank the district government a lot for that. That all happened before my time, thanks to my colleagues who negotiated that and our former board chair Gregory McCarthy from the Washington Nationals, and our former mayor Anthony Williams. They put that package together. Then we had to raise the rest of it to match those funds. So, your question is how did that happen?

Rebecca: Yeah, I think so often on the sponsorship end people have to think about sponsorship, it’s daunting, but to think about it in terms of 3.5 million dollars to make this thing happen, to get the matching funds is a tremendous mandate, one. Two, the actual benefits to the city are not immediate, it is over time, so how do you get sponsors engaged. Then how do you activate that around the event? As we’ve talked about, sponsorship has changed. People want different things than they used to, they want more value, and anything around that we’re very interested in. And we applaud you. That’s a big accomplishment.

Claire: Thanks! That was a big deal. There’s a number of things that we could talk about, but we won’t. Basically speaking, it worked a lot like a capital campaign. So, people who are listening who have experience with, there’s a big amount of money that comes at the beginning that comes from true believers. In our case, that was our partners in Virginia and Maryland and their state tourism boards, and Brand USA, which is the commerce departments international marketing organization. The three of them came on quite early and were almost part of the bid package. They all have a vested interest in global travel and tourism because if Washington DC is successful, the region is. Likewise, Brand USA entire purpose is to welcome international visitors here. Because its Washington DC, because it’s the federal government headquarters, it was like their hometown as well. So, that was great. Another large partner that came in early was the Airport’s Authority. Dulles and National Airports are the Washington regional airports authority and again, if IPW is successfully, they are. They all joined us and we were this initial pack of the major pack to bring IPW. IPW is measured in an increase in international visitation following. US Travel and Rockport analytics follow that, so people don’t have to take our word for it. It is expected that an increase of a million international visitors will come to Washington in three years following IPW, representing about 1.3 billion dollars ending. That comes from people coming to the city, those buyers we talked about, having an experience and booking more travel to Washington because of that. So, that’s outstanding.

Rebecca: I want to get back to that, but I’m also curious, are there other events that are in your portfolio that activate a city as much as this did in terms of the government, the regional partners…

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Claire: Yes and no.

Rebecca: What would an example be?

Claire: There are other travel industry events that are fairly similar. I can speak --

Rebecca: Like the Olympics? Or is it the – if we were going to host the NFL Super Bowl, would the whole city? Does it have to be that iconic to drive?

Claire: That helps. There are, the ones you just cited are very consumer oriented. An individual makes the choice to go to the Super Bowl or go to the Olympics, I think. This US Travel event was more into B2B, we’re catering to people who bring a volume of people which is why it’s so impactful.

Rebecca: Bigger value proposition.

Claire: Yeah, there are other industry events relevant to travel and tourism like the Student & Youth Travel Association. Those would be big ones for the cities that host them.

Rebecca: Once you got that layer in place, what was your approach for the next level?

Claire: For the next level, yeah. Businesses that have something to sell to those consumers, and so, I would advise people who are looking to raise money through corporate sponsorship to try to understand your product. Is that of value to your potential sponsors and customers? There’s a lot of ways that can go. But, the businesses who joined us to support IPW are looking for the customers that those international buyers were bringing. It was people like the Newseum, or the Spy Museum and Entertainment Cruises who are all looking to open their doors to international visitors. Also, shopping was a big deal, so Tysons Corner and Tangers Outlets joined us. Then I would also advise people all the sponsors, you start to go on some sort of custom experience, every partner is quite distinct on their personality and on their brand, so it’s impossible to apply a cookie cutter approach to them. We also found that people need something initial to work with. They rarely come to you and say this is what I want to do at your event. There’s so many iterations and questions. Ho w about this? Not that. WE can’t do that. How about this. So, what we did is we generated everything we could think of that might have a benefit to it. Digital communications, online marketing, VIP experiences in real-life at event, and kind of went to partners and said what do you think is the most impactful here

Rebecca: So, not cookie cutter at all. You didn’t say here’s a list, what do you want to sign off for?

Claire: We did a lot of that, too, but that rarely is how it ended up with each partner.

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Rebecca: That’s’ the trend we’re seeing as well. Clients go in with about 50 percent of here’s the basics but a menu of other things. What do you want out of the budget?

Claire: Totally. Some people just want to look good and bring their board of directors to a cool party and some people want a lot of direct, boots on the ground interaction and seeing everyone in the room wearing their logoed item. Some people wanted a lot of social media impressions, so fortunately, we had a robust enough program that we could deliver on all those things. But, we didn’t know that going in or what everyone was going to want,

Rebecca: That’s a big lift. To satisfy all those different elements. In terms of that interaction – you’re been involved in raising funds for other organizations, what has changed from what was being done to what is being done now in terms of how they want to be activated, the benefits, the VIP experiences versus what they used to be, what are they now? What are you hearing and seeing?

Claire: That’s a tough question. If anyone could really figure that out ---

Rebecca: C’mon Claire, I’m relying on you. You’re magical!

Claire: I think that a lot of people are looking to be recognized and looking for exclusivity. I found that with a number of our partners. They wanted to be the only one at this event. The only airline. The only retailer. Because the world is so thriving and complex and there’s so much cool stuff to do and going on, people are looking to fight through a lot of that clutter, and Destination DC can help that happen for a business. By aligning, automatically there’s a certain engaged audience and a level of capacity and profile that is raised from that. So, that kind of exclusivity is what I find people are looking for. And we created some experiences around that ---

Rebecca: How did you innovate around this? What innovations did you bring to the table?

Claire: I had a fun conversation with my colleagues yesterday to prepare for this. She said the coolest thing was what we did at the airports, and this is where we married two partners together. We said, IPW’s success was theirs. Airports are constantly battling any sort of negative image about it being a pain in the neck. They wanted people to have a positive, luxurious experience. We matched them up with Hilton who was looking to put their brand out as a comfortable place. We created a Hilton Welcome Lounge where we carved out a space next to baggage claim and brought in partners as facilitated by Linder, thank you very much, and constructed a really lovely lobby that felt like a hotel space. It had cool furniture, we brought in

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Northern Virginia, they have really cool wine and microbrew out there so we had a bar. From the airport concessionaires we had onsite masseuses, so people were getting massages

Rebecca: Literally addressing the pain in the neck?

Claire: Literally addressing the pain in the neck.

Rebecca: I like it! I never made that connection

Claire: Then we gave them a goodie bag full of snacks. People enjoyed it. Some cases, they said, “I’m going to wait for my chair massage and take the next one.” So, spending extra time in the airport, which is pretty cool. Then there were some incentives in what they were getting, when you returned on your way out, see these retailers on the inside. That was a creative stretch on everyone’s side. On our side to think it up, from the airports to be willing to say, “yeah you can construct this thing here and set it up in baggage claim and we’re just going to everyone look at it.” Then Hilton to say we think we can take people when they land and are so frazzled and make them feel good about our brand.

Rebecca: That’s fantastic. Sounds like everyone was quite happy with the outcomes of their participation.

Claire: It was good, everyone took a creative leap on that. I thank our partners for having faith that it would work well.

Rebecca: How do you – you’re in this ongoing position - how do you determine, what do you do post event to assess that in their eyes as well as in your own in validating that?

Claire: There’s a couple of things that happen – we, and by we, I mean a couple of my colleagues – put together really robust recap reports. We photographed everything a sponsor got at the event. We had a full deployment of photographers and people with cell phones to capture every logo and experience to prove what we delivered with the intention of giving people a giant manual that was heft and weighty prove these things. So, I brought one with me that I could refer to. This one is 51 pages long. So, that just, a reminder. Here’s all the stuff you got and the results on that. People are looking for validation on that.

Rebecca: Are they looking for social media impressions?

Claire: That depends on the partner. Some people pay close attention to it, and some people did not. Within our hashtag on Instagram, #MyDCCool, we had a 50 percent increase over the same week to the year prior. We can go to partners and say you were in our features, and here’s the results. And that was pretty cool. Some people really get that and some people say “oh, that

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seems nice.” Here’s the place I was or my boss was in this video, so that makes them look good. Here’s where my feature, for example, Big Bus was one of our big partners, and they’re very high energy and creative, they parked a bus outside of Nat’s Park, had Abraham Lincoln there, and people rolled up to take their picture in front of the Big Bus and loved it. And Big Bus was like “were on Facebook all over the world.” It was really cool, proving that those things happened is important in those recap reports. We’ve had a lot of conversations, just tell me how you felt about this. Those will be ongoing because to your point that IPW has delayed gratification as the numbers roll in over the next three years, we’ll have to continue to nurture these relationships and find out how their investment has paid off.

Rebecca: With an effort like this, given that IPW isn’t coming up again, how do you keep those relationships sustained? Is it necessary?

Claire: It’s definitely necessary. In our role, it’s our job to market the city. We ourselves don’t generate a lot of product, it’s our job to promote other peoples’ assets. So, we need our partners to continue to thrive. That is to everyone’s benefit. We have ongoing programs all the time that are about engaging the community and marketing nationally, so we’ll do that. Our tourism team has great partnerships globally, we have five international offices. We’ll continue to include our partners going forward. There’s always some sort of cool event and marketing opportunity around the corner, we’re nimble and responsive to capture those too.

Rebecca: What’s one of the challenges you and your team face in managing partnerships in DC in particular. Is there anything unique to DC?

Claire: Sure. I would even say that we’ve got some unique benefits because we’re DC, so there are certain things that come to DC just because we’re the nation’s capital. We have a lot of regulation. A lot of restriction about what can happen on some of our properties, like our parkland and the National Mall. Then we have an exclusivity and a prominence that confers with being the Capitol. Helping people identify and understand what’s the best way for them to participate because there are a lot of ways that it can be a little challenging to commercially promote here. No one else has a venue like ours.

Rebecca: That’s true. We are unique. There’s challenges, and other cities, there’s parkland, but there’s another layer of regulation here, I find.

Claire: We also, because we’re growing, lots of major metropolitan areas are growing, successful, but our business community is growing, it’s a lot more competitive now than it used to be. So, people are working with us to help sort of find their identity through that crowded marketplace and our challenge is how do we help raise their profile and to do that successfully?

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Rebecca: That’s interesting. So, now we’re going to get into, and we’re winding this up, I’d be curious to get your impression. Where do you draw inspiration from? How do you keep current?

Claire: So, working for Destination DC is a tremendous privilege. We get to sell the city. For people like my colleagues and I, who are intensely excited about our city, we love Washington, particularly the Partnerships and Alliances team are all really interested in how business functions, we really get to indulge in that. We get to stay on top of that by really staying in touch with our members, go to those member sites, see what their product is, invite them in to talk with us and see it in action. That’s the cool thing about business owners, they’re big picture and have to take out the garbage. The more we understand that and support them, the better we are at our jobs. For those of us who work at DDC, we love that, we’re total nerds for that, we think that’s so cool. I think it’s important to have a network of people who anyone gets energy from. I have a few people who have been helpful I stay connected to and find out what’s going on and it brings back a fresher energy.

Rebecca: Do you have a mentor specifically? Is this separate?

Claire: I know, it’s funny. There is someone who doesn’t know it yet, but I’m going to ask her to be my mentor. I’m going to ask her to be my friend and professional advisor. There’s not one, but everybody brings a different perspective. This morning I had breakfast with people in the arts community and they were talking about what’s going on in the theatre scene, and I admire all the jobs they create and the innovation they drive. This weekend I’d spent some time with a friend who’s a small business owner who is engaged in local politics, as you understand someone else’s challenges and their insight, there’s always something applicable to your own life.

Rebecca: Speaking of, you’re a very busy woman, you have a lot of balls in there, what’s your best personal business hack or personal hack you could share with our audience? It’s also that work life balance, how do you manage that?

Claire: There’s probably a few. Very simple, I have a google doc that’s a spreadsheet, and everyone knows about it, and it’s ranked by who is accountable and priority and what the item is. If I meet with my colleagues, I can say “here’s your name.” It’s always open, you can’t lose it, it’s always in there.

Rebecca: That’s what I need, a google doc. I have a lot of scraps of paper.

Claire: So, that’s like a very specific thing. I would say a life hack that keeps me excited and motivated is shared physical experience, so I really like to share a walk with someone or a bike

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ride or go and have some experience that’s outdoors or involves movement, because I think the kinetic experience works well in my brain, so I really enjoy that. That’s energizing.

Rebecca: I’ve seen you on that bike! You whizz past me many times. Claire, it’s been truly a pleasure. Thanks so much for being on our show today and being our guest and sharing your just thoughtful and meaningful insights. And helping our community be better.

Claire: Thank you! I look forward to so much more of it to come.

Rebecca: As do we. To you, out in the audience, in our next episode, we’ll be doing a quick-fire round with Claire. In the meantime, if you have more questions for me or for Claire, email us at eventceo@linderglobal.com.

Thanks for listening, and until next time, make your days great.

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