(Sanborn)– A new tourism effort in O’Brien, Lyon, and Clay counties is underway. O’Brien County Economic Development Director Kiana Johnson says this is the first effort for which these counties have collaborated…
“O’Brien County, Clay County Tourism and Lyon County Economic Development have formed a regional partnership to promote tourism. What happened is we met at the Travel Iowa Conference a couple years back and the emphasis has really been on collaboration regionally. We sat around talked about a few ideas and we decided this something we really wanted to try and see if we could do this by combining our resources and having a content creator come and visit our communities. So we worked with Kerry Belgrade with Decaffeinated Creative and we chose the topic of golf. One thing that northwest Iowa has a lot of are really good golf courses and we just have not been highlighting them, so we thought that was a great starter.”
She says it isn’t limited to just golf…
“While Kerry was here visiting our counties, we also asked that he, in addition to his golf, visit some of the sites, attractions, especially our coffee shops and our restaurants. So over a series of weeks then, Kerry set out to golf and by kicking off this partnership we feel we can highlight these courses but also bring people through northwest Iowa by starting in Lyon county and traveling through Osceola to O’brien into Clay county. We thought we could really highlight the northwest Iowa area.”
Johnson explains what happens from here…
“Kerry created a lot of content that we then will be pushing out on our social media sites. Using our Facebook accounts and our Instagram accounts, we will be promoting that content individually for our respective communities but also regionally. So O’Brien county will highlight Clay and Lyon but also then promote our own attractions as well.”
Johnson adds they’re excited about what lies ahead for the collaboration between the three counties and are working on other ideas.
