5 May 2020

Dear Woodland Business Community,

Join in on the #GOWoodlandLocal Instagram Campaign to increase visibility of your efforts as a local business!

We recently launched this campaign on Instagram and invite all Woodland businesses and local businesses with strong links to Woodland to participate in this free digital campaign. Below please find an overview on how to participate!

What:

The City of Woodland has launched the Instagram (IG) account: @GOWoodlandLocal. This platform will be the landing spot to promote and share posts published by Woodland businesses across all sectors.

The objective is to increase community awareness of what businesses are open, and what products/services they are offering. (The existing @TheFoodFront platform will continue to highlight local food & ag companies).

Why:

COVID-19 and the shelter-in-place order have led to a general drop in sales at our local (smaller) businesses as many have had to close their physical doors, but remain open for business via online or phone sales. While this campaign aims to address the immediate need for visibility on our local businesses during this difficult time, it is structured to support our businesses in the long term and continue on after the shelter-in-place order has been lifted.

How:

The City of Woodland invites all local businesses to participate in this free digital campaign. The success of this campaign relies on the investment of our businesses - the more that join in, the more significant our digital reach will be to consumers.

If you are a business that sells products or services to consumers, follow these steps to join in for free:

Follow the City’s IG account @GOWoodlandLocal (create a free account if you do not have one yet!)
Publish content on your IG account as often as you can to promote your products and services.

In each post:

Tag the City’s @GOWoodlandLocal IG account in your picture & add the hashtag #GOWoodlandLocal in the text portion of all of your posts.
Tag the City’s @TheFoodFront IG account in your pictures if you are you a food & ag business / sell local food & ag and add the hashtag #TheFoodFront in the text portion of all of your posts. This preexisting account is specifically designed to promote the sustainable, local, and innovative actions of your food & ag businesses.
Depending on the day, we recommend that you add the relevant daily hashtag to publish content according to the daily themes below:
- #BestSellerMonday | #MakerMonday
- #TakeoutTuesday | #GoodNewsTues
- #WorkItWednesday |#WayBackWednesday
- #ThirstyThursday | #ThankfulThursday
- #FearlessFriday #FoodieFriday
- #SaturdaySwag | #WoodlandWeekend
- #SelfCareSunday | #SpotlightSunday

**Following these steps will notify us at the City that you have published content, and we will repost it onto our own IG page to enhance visibility of your post. The more that businesses use the above-mentioned hashtags, more digital visibility of all posts will be created to consumers.**

3. Support each other on IG! Many Woodland businesses already have IG accounts with an established pool of followers. Like, comment, and repost your fellow Woodland businesses’ posts to encourage them to reciprocate the gesture and increase consumer visibility amongst each other’s followers.

The City will collaborate with local media sources and partners such as Visit Yolo to help further its reach and visibility to our community.

Example:

See an example post below from Matchbook Wines, an early adopter of this campaign. In this post, Matchbook:

Tagged @GOWoodlandLocal in the photo, and used the hashtag #GOWoodlandLocal in the text body.
Tagged @TheFoodFront in the photo and used the hashtag #TheFoodFront in the text body as they are also are part of our food & ag community.
As a bonus, they tagged @AWellStockedHome to show support of another Woodland business and also featured some of their products. We highly recommend featuring other businesses within your posts to generate cross-promotion of each other's efforts :)

Questions? Email Stephanie Burgos (Business Engagement & Marketing at the City of Woodland): Stephanie.burgos@cityofwoodland.org

Last but not least! Contact us to add your business to the publicly available database of Woodland restaurants, cafes, wineries, and breweries offering curbside and home delivery

To facilitate safe food access for our community while supporting our Woodland restaurants, cafes, breweries and wineries during shelter-in-place, a webpage of Woodland food businesses open for curbside and home delivery is available here for the public: https://bit.ly/2y2nyiA.

This link is periodically communicated to our community via Facebook: @TheFoodFront ; @CityofWoodland ; @WoodlandEconDev and Instagram: @TheFoodFront ; @GOWoodlandLocal

To submit modifications to this database, please email Stephanie Burgos: stephanie.burgos@cityofwoodland.org.

Contact your team

Our team is here to support you through this challenging time. Please contact us at the email addresses below (do not reply to this email). We look forward to connecting with you.

Ken Hiatt
Interim City Manager
Ken.Hiatt@cityofwoodland.org

Erika Bumgardner
Business Development Liaison
Erika.Bumgardner@cityofwoodland.org

Stephanie Burgos
Business Engagement & Marketing
stephanie.burgos@cityofwoodland.org

Grace Kumetat
Business Workforce & Development
Grace.Kumetat@cityofwoodland.org