Rainy River Future Development’s (RRFD) GoLocal campaign will be going away at the end of the year, with points expiring Dec. 31, but its 15-year legacy of achievement will remain, according to the program’s former manager.
RRFD first introduced the campaign in 2010. Since its inception, it has had a variety of successes, including community-building initiatives, incentives to buy local and a creating fun alternatives to shopping south of the border.
“Over the 15 years of the program, there was a lot of education about local shopping. We did massive amounts of social media,” said Tannis Drysdale, a consultant and the former manager and administrator of the program. “In the early days, for 10 or 12 years, we were at the forefront of that. So, doing Facebook Lives and fun things like celebrating National Caesar Day at multiple different restaurants in Fort Frances, when no one else was doing that sort of social media in town.”
Social media is everywhere now, but being among the first to use Facebook advertising gave the campaign promoting a local-first mindset was innovative and effective, Drysdale said. When it began, GoLocal sought help consumers understand that when they shopped where they lived, that money stayed in the community and helped pay for local firemen or sponsored their children’s hockey teams.
“I think the community’s acceptance and involvement and fun in utilizing the program, particularly over the first decade, was great,” Drysdale said. “I also think the retailers-helping-retailers aspect was a bonus of the program. The idea was that the realtor would help by giving points redeemable at a local restaurant. It was a really nice part of the program.”
RRFD, which has said it will announce how participants can redeem any leftover points next month, encouraged users to determine which retailers are still accepting GoLocal cards and redeem them before the program ends.
Drysdale said the initial approach of GoLocal was to create a positive atmosphere around keeping family spending at home, which would in turn foster a sense of community while helping finance a variety of community services across the district.
“The concept wasn’t created in Fort Frances, but we were looking for a way to translate that concept into something positive, not punitive. In the past, we sometimes tried to educate consumers about the value of local spending versus external spending by maybe making people feel bad about shopping or guilty about it.”
“We talked a lot about having fun with it. We never said, ‘Don’t go across the border and shop!’ We’d say things like, ‘Make a deal [with yourself] every time you go across the border. When you have dinner at a nice restaurant in International Falls, promise yourself that next time you’ll have dinner at a local restaurant in Fort Frances. If you’re in the city and find a beautiful pair of shoes, promise yourself that next time you’re downtown in Fort Frances, you’re going to buy another pair of beautiful shoes.”
The idea was that big-ticket items like trucks and cars, and at one point, even homes, would be rewarded with a lot of points. Those points would then help local retailers, particularly small retailers and restaurants, and the whole community would benefit from the ecosystem of rewards moving back and forth.
“We wanted to create a loyalty program so we could track spending and determine success,” Drysdale said. “We also tried to make it as cooperative as possible amongst as many retailers as possible. Many Go-Local programs took the stance that they were trying to be exclusive to independent, family-owned retailers.
As the times changed, so did the program.
“Our community has changed over the last 15 years, too, and so has consumer shopping behaviour. Remember, this was pre-Amazon days,” Drysdale said. “So out shopping, it’s not nearly where we are now. We looked around, hired consultants and found some really cool, innovative ideas and patched them all together. That seems to be something people intuitively understand now.”
But the local retail landscape has changed dramatically since 2010, Drysdale said, with retailers increasingly able to offer loyalty programs that are more internal and in-house. In the beginning, there were loyalty cards people kept in their purses when we launched Go Local.
“Now, everybody’s got a different program, and that’s great, but that part of the campaign has changed. People now use apps, and we’re still really old-fashioned. We’re mailing out gift cards rather than redeeming on the spot.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was another agent of dramatic change for local shops, as purchasers increasingly looked to online shopping solutions and delivery capacity exploded worldwide in response.
“We, universally, all became much more comfortable with online shopping. So, getting back to downtown will be a challenge for retailers,” Drysdale said.
“The program was launched at a time when we were in a massive transition, and our paper mill was slowly closing over time, and it was a way that we could actively impact, as consumers, our local economy. We couldn’t change the fact that people were reading on Kindles and spending less on books anymore, or what some multinational company out of Quebec was going to do with our futures, but we could shop local, and the community truly embraced the understanding that they could have a real and meaningful impact on what their community looks like.”
While there is no clear successor to the GoLocal program, Rainy River Future Development said it will continue to advocate for and support the Rainy River District.
