New Website to Support Tourism & Local Businesses

It’s happening!!  We are putting together the best, largest and most impactful website promoting the McKenzie River area our local businesses.

The goal is this:

To create an amazing, living online tourism magazine that integrates local McKenzie Businesses with our attractions.

This will be an attractive and easy to navigate website, and possibly an app, that makes it easy for locals and tourists to find businesses, services and great places to visit in our area.

Subgoals:

1. Focus on attracting high value tourists that have a light ecological impact and a big financial one
2. Ensure that local businesses are promoted with natural attractions to encourage visitors to spend money locally.
3. Promote local business resources to locals (not tourists) 

After creating a high powered community portal, McKenzieCommunity.org supporting fire recovery, community improvement and other non-profit activity, McKenzie Community Partnership is taking what we learned, and creating an even bigger website aimed at supporting local businesses unlike any our community has ever had before.

We have done our homework, researching best practices for using websites and social media to support and grow local businesses.  We have also been participating in local community meetings where locals have discussed their struggles and concerns. We have been attending many community meetings including the most recent “60 Mile Main Street” meetings.  Gathered input form surveys and words shared by local businesses.  Our team includes people who have been and currently are, operating small businesses here. 

We will continue to reach out to local business owners for your insight on how we can best help support your business.

Our Executive Director and project lead, Chris LaVoie, has Masters in Business w specialization in Marketing and Entrepreneurism (starting and operating small businesses).  He has taught at Bushnell University and Lane Community college.  His first company in Oregon, Nu-World Communications, grew to be the largest independent local internet service providers in Lane County before selling the company.  His company specialized in creating and running online stores (large websites) that generated millions of dollars in revenue.   Chris has also owned and operated McKenzie River Mountain Resort, a local guide and shuttle business as well as setting up food carts, operating AirBnBs and over 20 years of property management experience.  This experience provides him a wide range of connection points to help other local businesses.   

This project is made possible by the generous support of local donors, our executive director, Chris LaVoie.

As any of you who have hired professional web developers know, web development is not cheap.  We have funds to support our initial build out.  We will be need ongoing support from our community business members to help us grow our impact and potential.