 The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good afternoon everyone. It's a pleasure to have you join us for a webinar today on the power of buying local. My name is Josh Thompson. I'm with the Economic Development Division of the Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Skills Training and I'll be moderating and providing technical support for today's webinar. I'm joined today by the co-executive director of LOCOBC, Katya Makura, Township of Langley counselor and business owner Angie Kuali and Township of Langley senior manager Val Gafka. Together they'll be sharing their stories of buying local and the impact it has had on their businesses and communities. But before I hand things over to Katya, I'm going to briefly run through some tips that will help you get the optimal experience with go-to webinar. On the screen in front of you, you should see your control panel there and I'm just going to point out a few buttons that you'll be using today. So this one on top will hide and unhide your panel. This will make it full screen. This raise a hand button will let me know that you'd like to pose a verbal question to our panelists today. So if you push that button, I'll be able to see that on my end and I can unmute you if you'd like to provide a question or a comment to our panelists. If you're not sure if your microphone on your computer works, your best bet is to use the phone dial-in option. It's a Canadian toll number, but that will guarantee that your audio comes in nice and clear. If you'd rather go the easier route, feel free to just type in your question using this pane below and I can read it aloud to our presenters today. We'll have a number of opportunities for questions during today's webinar, but we should have ample time that they all get answered. So feel free to type them in as you think of them. There'll be plenty of time and we'll get to them when we are able. So with that, I would like to introduce Katcha. She is a strategic planning consultant with a background in digital strategy, branding, communications and sustainability. Her focus is on helping companies operationalize their vision by bringing creative ideas, business thinking, technology and sustainability strategy together to create unique business value. She has over 16 years experience as a strategist, information and business analyst and facilitator for both global brands and independent businesses. Katcha has a BCOM from the University of British Columbia and a Master's of Science in Leadership for Sustainability from the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Prior to joining LOCO, Katcha had her own consulting practice for nine years. Earlier in her career, she was a lead strategist at Blast Radius where she developed a strategic planning process model and led the application of it to global clients such as Nintendo of America, Nintendo of Europe, HSBC, Atlantic Records and Nike. She was also on the management team of a Vancouver-based design consultancy where she led client engagements and helped grow the business from five to over 20 employees within two years. With this business background, Katcha has a keen understanding of what is important to business leaders at all scales of organization. She is a champion for business success and believes in business as a powerful force for positive social change. With that, Katcha, I'm going to turn the screen over to you. As soon as you see that kickoff, you can start your presentation. Thanks, Josh. Can everyone see the presentation? Yes, they're nice and clear. Thank you for the introduction and for the opportunity to talk about bilateral campaigns on the webinar. First, I just wanted to give a little bit of a background about local BC to give our audience an idea of what we do and where we're coming from as an organization. So local BC is a not-for-profit society. We're a local business alliance that's focused on growing the local economy in British Columbia. And our mission is really to shift purchasing dollars to and between local businesses in BC. And really that's our – we focus on purchasing as a key lever for growing the local economy through procurement and helping to create thriving, resilient communities by creating those linkages through the local economy. So we do this in two ways as an organization. We're a part business network and part research and advocacy organization. With the business network, we have over 200 members who are independent businesses. Many are located in the lower mainline, but we also have some from across the province, including Venki Rylan, Cetus Dicord or Fraser Valley and the Okanagan. And our goal with the network is really to provide ways that these businesses can release the value they have for each other, whether it's as suppliers, partners, just resources as an entrepreneur. And our member programs try to create those platforms for connection. On the research and advocacy side is what – which is what I'll be talking mostly about today. We look at the underlying economic benefits that local and independent businesses have in the province. So in 2013, we launched our first multiplier study in BC in Canada called the Power Purchasing Report. And I'll talk more about the results of this in the coming slides. Just last December, we launched a report on the impact of e-commerce on local and independent retail in BC and Canada. We're working on a measurement framework to measure economic impacts and opportunities with businesses and industry segments called our local impact assessment framework. And we coordinate the BC by local campaign, which I'll also be talking about more today as well. So the first question we often get asked is why local? Why is it important? And really, it's because despite the fact that local businesses are recognized as a powerful and positive economic force in BC, they're also losing market share. Canadian local businesses have left than half the total market share on average, and this has been dropping steadily, pretty steadily since 2008. And in BC, local retailers have the third lowest market share in the country. And the decline in market share matters because locally owned businesses have positive ripple effects on our community and in our economy. And they're a powerful economic engine, and they generate value by circulating dollars many times with other businesses to create jobs and build wealth. We call this recirculation effect. So we know that local businesses, this is based on our study that local businesses recirculate two and a half times more revenue locally. And we also know that small shifts in purchasing towards local can have a disproportionately large impact on jobs and wages in the province. So by shifting just 1% of purchases to BC owned businesses, we can generate up to 3,100 jobs and 94 million wages in the economy. And that's just shifting purchasing. That's not any net new purchasing. So to give an example that puts it into perspective for the average BC household, the average BC household spends just below $59,000 annually on goods and services. So 1% shift in spending to local works out to about $49 a month per BC household. So looking at the results of our 2013 study more closely, we can see how those recirculation effects occur and where those impacts come from. So we based the study on a highly commoditized V2D product, which is office supplies. We looked at the local independent office supplier based out of East Vancouver called Mills Office Productivity. And we compared them to a Canadian supplier at the time, which was Grand and Toy. I think they got bought out by OfficeMax since that study. The multinational, which was Staples, and a pure online retailer, which was OfficeMax. So to create our mirror, we used a well-established economic methodology that's been used in similar studies across the United States and the UK. So what we saw was that based on a $1 million contract, the local supplier contributed 100% more into the local community than the multinational, which was Staples. And this direct local recirculation takes the form of jobs, taxes, and procurement or purchasing with other local businesses. And then those businesses, this is where the recirculation effect comes in, also provide local jobs and pay taxes and buy from other local businesses as well. We also looked at local purchasing as a percentage of total purchasing in the study. And what we saw was that although they also applied office supplies, which are generally commoditized and come from some few key sources, like posted notes come from GM, that kind of thing. Mills local purchasing was more than double its multinational competitors. And that's largely due to the fact that it's head offices local. As I mentioned, it's in Vancouver and British Columbia. So head offices, they don't just purchase the inventory supplies, but they also purchase non-inventory purchases. So this is services, cleaning supplies, branding and marketing, accounting, those kinds of things. And local businesses are more likely to purchase those things with other local businesses. Another significant outcome from the study is related to employment. The recirculation effect of local businesses generates not just more dollars in the economy, but also more diverse employment opportunities and opportunities for wealth creation and distribution. So as I mentioned, head offices have broader purchasing mandate than other offices. They'll also have a broader range of jobs and in particular management and executive level jobs. So this is where some of the job diversity comes from, but also the wealth distribution through higher paying level jobs. So what we can see here is a diversity employment and opportunity and also in terms of breadth, but also in terms of the quality of the available employment opportunities that are around as well. And then as I mentioned, local businesses also hire local service suppliers like accountants and lawyers and marketing firms. And so that also helps to contribute to that broader diversity of jobs and the incirculation of those businesses as well. Sorry, jumped ahead there. And there's lots of social benefits to supporting local businesses as well. So one of the things we found was that local businesses give up to five times more to charities in their community. So Mills is a great example of this in particular. They're a certified B Corp, which is sort of a good business circulation, sustainable business certification program. They have a green fleet. They have a strong volunteer program with the Vancouver Food Bank. And they also do social hiring. So they, in their warehouse, they've hired those with barriers to employment. And they actually, Mills is a great case in particular. They actually found that they sort of hit a ceiling with the number of people they were able to hire. And those hires were actually staying a long time. They helped to create a social enterprise in the downtown Eastside that provided a training program for people with barriers to employment. It's called half cap pay. So this is an example of some of the ripple effects that local businesses generate. It's real value in terms of jobs and wages. But there's also additional impacts such as local investment. Local businesses often bank with local credit unions, for example, who tend to give back more into our local communities. As I said, they pay taxes, which contributes to infrastructure and things like parks and communities in the community. And then there can even be positive environmental impacts with more local supply chains. You can reduce the effects of those global supply chains, carbon impacts, that kind of thing. So if there's so many businesses that are buying local, then why... If there's so many benefits to buying local, what are the challenges? And what we found is that one of the key challenges is defining local. And I'll talk about how we define it in a moment. People are sometimes challenged to identify local businesses. Another is measuring the impacts, like what impact does local purchasing really have. So we're working on that as well. And finally, understanding availability and supplier capacity. So at the procurement, institutional procurement level, we often see that procurement people and RFPs, they're worried that local businesses don't have the ability to scale up or provide products and services at the scale that institutions might need. So we try to work with them on different strategies to help local businesses compete at that level. And then it's also just understanding what is a local product and making it really easy for people to understand the availability of those products and services. So as part of our advocacy work, we took the first question, what is local and did about a year's worth of research come up with the definition that looked at the economic impact of a local business versus more mileage-based definition? So if you look at it from a miles point of view, for most of Canada, a local definition that would be based on mileage, it might make sense from a carbon perspective if you're looking at carbon miles for example, but not necessarily from an economic one. Since most Canadian cities are kind of located on the border, a 200 kilometer radius or 300 kilometer radius can often make the difference between buying between BC and the U.S., for example, sort of a move point. So we actually want to look at where the value and impact lies. And based on our study, we chose to look at ownership and production. So for a local-owned business, 51% is the baseline across the board, and then any additional value just increases from there when you get further about 51%. So a local-owned business is 51% ownership, private ownership in British Columbia and also their headquarters in BC. For a local-owned product, it's a minimum of 51% of the agricultural inputs are from British Columbia, and for a local-made product, 51% of the processing or manufacturing occurs in British Columbia. And then these definitions can be sort of built on each other, so a product can be locally made, locally grown, and from a local-owned business, and you'd have the most value there, but you're really creating economic value if any one of these definitions are present. And we designed this definition as well, as you mentioned, to be scalable. So LOCO looks at BC-wide as our definition of local, but we wanted to create a definition that regions or communities could scale to their areas as well. This is just a quick slide to talk about the impact framework that we're developing in terms of ways to measure the impact that individual businesses or industries or sub-industry groups could have. So we see this impact framework as almost like an economic footprint that can be looked at to measure businesses, practices, and how they're impacting the community. So we look at geography, so where this kind of tells us where taxes flow, where employment is generated, and also where reinvestment is happening. We look at ownership and ownership models because that tells us where the profits are felt and how wealth is distributed. So different local ownership models, including cooperatives or employees share ownership plans, profit sharing plans, those tell us a little bit about how wealth is distributed in the province along with the diversity of employment through geography. And then with business practices, we're focused on those practices that are related to purchasing. And the economic recirculation impacts, and we have some tools that we can refer people to to also look at the environmental, social, and giving practices and how they're involved in their businesses as well. So the idea is really to have people consider what they're doing as a business, how they're contributing to their community, and also to find a way to celebrate those businesses who are doing it really well. This slide looks at Modo. So we've piloted our assessment. We're moving into the second pilot of assessment this month. But from our first pilot, Modo was probably one of our larger participants. And what we found was even though they have the product that is not local, Modo is a car sharing cooperative program. So obviously the cars are not made in British Columbia. But through how they've set up their business practices, they're able to have a lot of economic impact. They use mostly local suppliers for their vehicle servicing, for their marketing and the merchandising, a lot of their inventory and consumables. They've actually upped their numbers since doing this assessment. They decided it was the core value for them, and they really look at ways that they can localize their purchasing. And what's interesting too is they're able to increase some of those business impacts as well by working with social enterprises. So one example is they work with Kenya's Car Wash that provides opportunities for youth in crisis. So that also helps to create value in the community. So that's a little bit of the background of the research that feeds into our buy local campaign. And now that I've covered off that why local message, I'm going to switch gears a bit to talk about buy local campaigns and the campaign framework. But I thought this might be a good time to see if there are any questions from the audience. Take a break from talking. Thanks for all that great baseline so far, Katcha. We did have one question come in from Chrisken right at the start of the presentation asking how you define local. But I think you did a pretty good job of summing all that up in the previous slide there. So if anyone else does have any questions feel free to type them into that question and answer pane or feel free to raise a hand and we can go that route. Maybe just give it another 30 seconds or so. Let Katcha have another sip of water. Not seeing anything come in, but if you do think of something feel free to type that in and we can get to it as soon as there is a natural break in Katcha's presentation. Yeah, not seeing anything so carry on Katcha. Okay, great. So now I'm going to switch gears a bit and talk about buy local campaigns, how weather and how they work and a little bit about the campaign that we've developed. So do buy local campaigns work? Studies show that active and consistent campaigns do work. So through an organization in the United States called the Institute for Local Self-Reliance or ILSR, we coordinate a study of the success of buy local campaigns in BC and ILSR actually measures on the cost of American where the BC partners and we coordinate getting results from BC based businesses. So these studies show they've been doing them for several years now. We've been doing them for the last three years and the last two in particular have had really statistically relevant results. And the studies show that these campaigns do impact sales as well as customer awareness and loyalty. They can increase sales by 3.5% or more in communities where there's other set active and consistent campaigns. In 2014 what we found in the BC study was that a third of businesses reported a positive impact of the results of campaigns in their community. So this isn't just our campaign but this is active by local campaigns that are maybe running in any community. And then over 65% of the businesses reported an increased public awareness and the benefits of buying local as well. Other studies consistently show that consumers love local as well. So last year we did a consumer study as part of our research into the impact of e-commerce on independent retail. On the consumer side of that study we saw that almost 70% of consumers cited Canadian ownership as an important value and 50% of those consumers actively seek local products and even prefer more local products. Like products from their province or their city. So if we look at trends like the craft beer movement and the maker trends, those are all part of that overall consumer trend to local products as well. And this supports, again, is supported by a study from 2013 from the Business Development Bank of Canada that shows that 45% of Canadians making effort to buy Canadian products. So what we know, you know, overall marketing and sales intelligence tells us that definitely price and convenience are pretty consistently the top two factors for most purchasers. But once you get into that second level of factors of when you might be making choices between products that are similar on the price and convenience side, local has a high value and influence in that level of decision making. So as an organization, local BC really want to create a campaign that was designed to help communities and partners respond to these economic development and consumer trends. We wanted to create a campaign that could support existing campaigns or be used as a turnkey solution for communities that didn't have one going or didn't have the resources to create something. So the campaign is a framework with three key objectives. The first is to illuminate the market for consumers, so let them know where those local businesses and products are. The second is to engage businesses in identifying and talking about their local impact. So one of the things we found with local businesses is sometimes they don't know how or what context to talk about the ways in which they're local. So if they're local business but they don't have a lot of products, for example, they might not feel comfortable talking about it, or if they sell local products but not exclusively local products, they don't always know how to bring that value to the forefront for consumers. So we have some tools and collateral that helps them talk about the ways they engage with their community as a local business with other local businesses and what products in the store might be local and that kind of thing. And finally, we maintain an ongoing campaign platform that, as I mentioned, can be used as a turnkey approach or can be integrated with existing campaigns to create a consistent message throughout the province. And our role is really to support that framework, but the reach is driven through partnerships such as with the township of Blenley who will be speaking later. It's really about linking local efforts. So for business networks and communities, we want to help build a bi-local movement and help them commit to a larger message that has some consistency across the province. And with the second year of this campaign with the pink dot, what we have found that on anecdotally, people are recognizing the dot bar as they move through communities in the province. So we've heard that from some of our partners. Also, networks can engage locally on businesses in a campaign that's focused on celebrating local businesses and their success and capitalizing on that consumer trend. At the business level, it's, as I said, helping them communicate those local characteristics, capitalizing on that consumer trend, and offer a way for local supporting corporations to highlight their local contributions as well. So when we work with many communities and business networks, they have non-local businesses in their networks that they have to serve as well. And what we want to do is encourage those businesses to also buy from local businesses or sell local products. So our tools are designed that those, you know, whether it be a safe way or some other kind of non-local business, can highlight the ways it contributes to the community. It's also a way of encouraging them to do so. The campaign framework is centered on the concept of this pink dot, which is very easily to spot and easily visible, and the hashtag BCBILocal, which we use in social media. So this is an example of how the design can be customized for communities. It can be co-branded, as you can see with the township of Langley, and it links into the overall, like, general BCBILocal messaging. We also have other collateral, including posters, stickers, other ways to present the underlying stats and facts with the while local message for consumers. The digital framework of the campaign is quite important. You can see the campaign site at the microsite is at dcbilocal.com. And the way it works is that the microsite draws off the Instagram photos with the hashtag BCBILocal. And then we use social media posts from the website and other posts to provide content and storytelling opportunities to the campaign. So we can repost. We have a consumer newsletter list that we're building, and we encourage businesses and business communities to do that as well. So that helps amplify the message across all participants. This year is our second year of the campaign with this branding. The campaign actually runs December until the end of November each year, but just started with May, since this is our upcoming campaign. This year we have three formal activations planned. In May, I'll talk about it in a moment, but we're watching our Eat Local campaign, which is a food and grocery-oriented marketing campaign push trying to highlight local products in grocery stores. It's basically engaging consumers where they're at. In the summer we'll be celebrating businesses that are using the campaign well. It will be tied into the BC Day long weekend with storytelling content to celebrate local businesses. And then this year in December we'll have our fifth annual BCBILocal Week in the province and the third with this branding. So this year our primary campaign metrics are about raising awareness of the dot with consumers and what it means. So we're measuring this primarily through impressions and social media. And we also want to look at how we're engaging businesses in the campaign. So we measure this through distribution of the materials and the use of the hashtags. So this is just some of an example of the results that we had after BILocal Week in December. And we were pretty successful in getting those impressions with consumers and building our consumer list. This is an example of the upcoming campaign for spring, which is launching just before the May long weekend. So essentially our overarching goal with this campaign around Eat Local is to take the local awareness and understanding that consumers have about food and really hone in on that. And then throughout the campaign and the rest of the year to take that understanding and expand it to other categories as well. But for this campaign in particular we'll be focusing on food and grocery and building those impressions of the dot. We're engaging communities and grocery and food retailers to participate on the ground to have the dot visible in stores and on products. And some of the activities that we have planned for May include consumer contests. We're calling it the Eat Local Challenge. Challenge them to kick off the summer with the Eat Local meal or barbecue. We have retail collateral packages for retailers and for food producers. We'll be doing digital advertising to help build that awareness through social media. And we have some storytelling opportunities with our local impact assessment and creating custom digital platform for communities if they're interested. So if you're interested in hearing more about the May version campaign or getting involved, I think Josh will contact information. We'll be part of the follow-up materials from the webinar and just contact me and send you more information about that. Finally, the campaign really doesn't work without our partners. Both to fund it. The campaign is entirely self-funded and all the money we raise goes into supporting the campaign itself. But more importantly, to activate the campaign in the communities with businesses. So now I wanted to turn it over to our hosts from the Township of Linley. They joined the campaign in December this year and really ran with it. They've been a great partner so they'll talk about how they see Local unfolding in their community. Angie Quali is the counselor of the Township of Linley and she's very active in the business community as the owner of the well-seasoned gourmet food store. And Valgathka is the senior manager of corporate administration at the Township of Linley. She's been a great partner in taking this campaign framework and customizing it for the communities in Linley. And maybe just before we hand things over, sorry just to cut you off there Val for a second, but we've just had a couple of questions come in that I think might be relevant before we move on to the next part of the presentation. So just a couple of questions here from Colleen who asks, what do you see is the difference between by local and think local? And I think that might be just sort of a different branding exercise, but maybe Katchy you can speak to that a little bit. Yeah it is partly branding. We are part of the think, there is a movement in the U.S. and Canada around using language think local first. And that's definitely part of our message. But when we came up with planning this campaign which we did in partnership with several communities, business improvement associations and businesses, we realized that our message was really around purchasing. For this campaign in particular we're really focused on how can we shift those dollars over. And so we just ended up going with the by local, BC by local simple message where you know exactly what are called to actionists for people. But definitely in our minds it does include that think local first message. And it's really just and we want to support that as well. It's really like first you have to make those local options available and make people aware of them. And then they can instead of hunting it down themselves, we just want to make it really easy to take that next step to find local. Awesome. Thanks Katchy. And then just the second follow up question from Colleen there is, she's asking are you involved with the BC Chamber of Commerce as a partner? At the moment we're not involved with the BC Chamber of Commerce. It's a pretty grassroots campaign. We sort of added partners every time we run an activation, we add new partners. It's been I think a relatively slow bill partially based on the capacities of our organization and our ability to reach out to people. But definitely those are the kinds of groups that we would love to partner with. Great. With just a couple of questions there just to break things up, I think we'll hand things over to Val and Angie. Take it away. Thank you very much. So just want to formally say thank you on behalf of the Township of Langley for providing us with the opportunity to participate today. We're definitely a champion of bilocal and just want to say invariably what we're here to do today is to share with you our bilocal story. So we're no different than any other municipality in British Columbia. A large part of our community is comprised of small business and in 2014, then City did a report, if you will, open for business that actually qualified that by saying 98% of business in British Columbia is small business. So with that, the Township and our economic development vision and what local BC is doing, they very much drive together and it was a natural connection for us to work and help grow and expand our local economy and help the businesses in our community. So for those of you who aren't familiar with the Township of Langley, just a few little demographics of a little bit about who we are and where we are. So invariably located in the Lower Mainland, kind of central between Vancouver and Chilliwack, we call ourselves the hub of the Fraser Valley. So we're 116,000 people as of the end of 2015, projected to double within the next 15 years. So some pretty steady growth there in a very short order and maybe something unique about the Township, a couple of things actually, one being that 75% of our land use is within the ALR. So helping to expand and grow the food sector is definitely something in our foresight and one of the edges of the Township actually borders or connects with the United States. So we have perhaps maybe some unique economic challenges, especially when the dollar is favorable for Canadians to be shopping in the States and one of those reasons why we also looked to see how we can make a change to have people really consider shopping locals first. In 2015, just some housing stats, lots of housing starts in 2015. We have over 6,000 active business licenses in the Township and relatively inexpensive to get to obtain a business license here. Our business taxation is like many other municipalities. Some of the larger cities in the province can be around the 3 to 5 to 7% of residential tax, but ours is closer to the 3 end. And sectors of all types in the municipality between agriculture, construction, healthcare, manufacturing, we do have an aviation rotary wing niche, if you will, hospitality, retail, transportation, and we have a fairly vibrant film production community as well. So that's just a little bit about us and who we are. So why we got involved? Councillor Colley is going to share a little bit about how we got involved and why we did this. Thanks, Hal. Why we got involved? Because it's important. It's important to a thriving community that we support the business community here in the Township of Langley. We have a pretty progressive business climate here in the Township. There's a lot of entrepreneurial spirit here in the Langley's and I think as a municipal government it's our job to sort of help build on that spirit and sort of facilitate the growth in our independent businesses here. You know, Catia was talking a little bit about a shift in spending and how a simple 1% shift increases. I think she said around $46 per household. It's really easy to see here in a small community, a relatively small community with less than 120,000 residents, how that kind of shift can really make a difference to our community. It also adds a lot of benefit to the community because Langley isn't just all independent locally owned businesses. We have a lot of other types of business here in the community, but they all seem to kind of work together and the local businesses that are maybe not as locally based as some certainly participate in the whole process of the local economy through employment and all kinds of other pieces. As a business owner, I own a specialty food store in a cooking school here in Langley and as a business owner I've been supporting independent food processors and manufacturers for a really long time. So it was a natural connection to me to local BC, to BC by local because I've been waving that flag as a business person for a really long time. As I said, I sort of think it's local government's responsibility on a certain level to help champion a strong economy and growth in our business community and to leverage partnerships that we have in the municipality to encourage buying local and supporting our local businesses. Katja also said about the percentage of businesses. She said that local businesses give up to five times the amount of donations to local charities as non-locally based businesses and in a community like Langley we have a fantastic volunteer community here that works really hard to make Langley as great a community as it is and so the volunteer base and our service organizations or service clubs really rely heavily on our independent business to support their work as nonprofits and so the connection is just reiterated again and again that when you're shopping local it affords the local businesses the opportunity to support the local nonprofits and it raises the whole community up. So one of the things that I've had a really good fortune of participating in this program with the township and fortunately we have municipal employees who are very forward thinking and open and receptive to new ideas and so when I came to Val and introduced Val to this program she was, yes, absolutely, how do we get involved and where do we participate. So I feel fortunate as a leader in the community that we have a municipal government that's interested in moving this agenda forward. So there's a lot of opportunity to share success I think in the township before looking at that. The campaign that the township participated in last winter was the local, BC by local campaign and the township had all of these proprietary buttons and stickers and posters made and it was really fantastic as a participant in the program to see my staff engaging with our customers with our community members about this but as somebody who is a representative of a local government it was so incredible to walk into the businesses in our community and see the people that were participating in this program. Our community, our township because of Val's, through her department, through economic development they communicate with a lot of the local businesses on business licensing renewals and all of that. This is a really great opportunity I think for the township to interface with the local businesses on a totally different level than they ever get to participate. This isn't just about perhaps licensing and regulations and collecting municipal taxes. This is about working on something together and sort of shifting the awareness to local and the importance of that. So I really think it gave the opportunity to the township to let the local business community know that they are important to them and they do make a difference in the community and so through this program a lot of our local businesses or all of the local businesses that participated were able to sort of network with each other and talk about the other businesses participating and sort of give a little bit more back to the community. So I'm absolutely certain that the success from the program that Val and her team ran last year will continue to grow and be even more successful. In fact, Val has planned an initiative for the local month and I'll let Val tell you what she's got planned for that. So I think one of the first things that we thought of, when Councillor Quali approached us last year was, oh my goodness, do we have the time and the effort to be doing this? How much do we need to invest to get involved and it was actually quite easy and I think that's one of the things that I'd like to highlight is the fact that local was so helpful in kind of bringing to us whatever we needed. Having all of the information that they do and the materials available online really made it easy for us to either distribute that information or for us to point businesses and business organizations in our community to, which includes the Chamber, kind of going back to someone's question earlier, we do work with our business organizations on that level. So we got out of the gate really quick last year and it was just simply for the bi-local week at the end of the year. So we probably had about, I don't know, maybe a couple of weeks heads up and we were out of the gate. We developed a website and a sign up portal. We did a whole bunch of social media. We got these buttons made locally for really very inexpensively and we really did have an ocean of paint out in the community. We wrote some media articles and released those to the local media which they grabbed onto and local also web tagged all of the participants on their website. So people, whether they were in the township or the broader region, were able to see which businesses were participating in and how they could actually get out and use some of their consumables. With the social media, we were able to kind of track, hit some views, etc. and that was extremely valuable as well. We got a lot of positive comments through social media like, you know, I love living in Langley and supporting the many local businesses. There's no need to go outside of the community which are all things that we really wanted to hear. So we're wrapping up for 2016. We have put some information out in our Insight newsletter which is our economic development newsletter that goes up quarterly. Sharing with businesses how they can participate and with a non-business reader and also get involved. We've been out to our business organizations making campaign presentations and we're hosting a challenge with them this year asking them to generate as many possible new sign-ups for this program so effectively just handing over the campaign to some extent to the business organizations and helping them leverage local within our own community as a whole. We developed some information business cards so they look like your standard business card but on the back they're intended for the business community and it simply provides them with all the information they need to know about how they can get involved this year. So if we're out at events and we don't have a chance to speak with people we provide them with this card and they've got all the information that they need to know on how they can participate in our activities this year. With Eat Local which is the first activation as Katya mentioned in May we're going to be providing some free billfold promotional information that restaurants can put in with a bill to help people understand how they're buying power affects the local economy and we're definitely out at community events and markets to connect with people because by local is obviously very something that really resides and resonates for a lot of people now and we want to make sure that we connect with the community and raise their awareness. And as Councillor Colley mentioned we're actually doing an Eat Local event here on a Council night. So on May 9th from 2-5pm we will be holding an Eat Local event at our Civic facility that happens to be intentionally a data council meet so there will be two council meetings that day and the Eat Local feature which will have about 20 displays of different food sector businesses in the community will actually have stalls or booths if you will in the Civic facility so that people coming out to the council event can invariably participate in the Eat Local feature and vice versa. So we get a little bit of a slow start but we've ramped up and we've got 20 full booths for the May 9th event so that is just kind of one of the things that we'll be working out of the gate starting in May and then working until August and through to the last activation in the fall. So those are some of the things that Township has done to try and leverage something that is starting to become an ocean of pink across BC and we're very proud to be working with Local to present anything that the Township can do to help other municipalities with their activities. We're here to help. Thanks very much. Awesome, well thank you both so much for sharing your experiences with Buying Local and with this campaign and certainly very kind of you to extend that all the branched other communities as well to talk to you for some of your successes and learning opportunities as well. During the presentation we've had a lot of questions come in so I'm going to start at the top of the queue here and we can work our way down. So first question up, Felicity asks, what would be the difference between Buying Local and the 10% shift campaign? We've been promoting 10% shift in our community. Is there a move to Buying Local as the recognizable brand? Well I can answer that. The 10% shift campaign I'm not sure whether we're out with that campaign. One of the things that we found was sometimes wrapping people's head around the 10% message was hard so we moved that down to 1% partly because the impacts at 1% are also quite impressive and sometimes when you talk about 1% it's just an easier number for people to wrap their heads around. As I said, our campaign isn't really designed to compete. We really more want to support other campaigns so with the hashtag model and the co-branding available we're easily able to co-market with other campaigns. So I don't think there's anyone go to campaign they have slightly different messaging but at the core we're all going for the same, we have the same goal. Awesome, thanks Katja. Next question here. Pat asks if we have a bi-local and or an e-local campaign in our community how do you recommend they be integrated? Well one way I think is through the co-branding there's different levels we have just at the free level if you're using the hashtag with BC Bi-local we monitor that so we're able to see that and as Val said then we can amplify those efforts through our platform through some of the paid resources we can provide you some additional collateral to use and maybe Val and Angie can talk about how they see how they see those kinds of things working. For me I think because I'm in the food business it's a really easy conversation for me to have about how to highlight bi-local and e-local I don't think should ever be far from the same sentence. So I think in the township particularly as Val mentioned 75% of the Langley Township is inside the ALR we're a huge food and beverage producing region so we have a lot of product that our local restaurants can access and particularly with the change in growing season may more product has become available so I think with the available information that Val and her team have created there's really a great opportunity for people who sell food and process food in our community to have the conversation about not just local but almost even hyper local like what is coming out of Langley and then what's coming out of the province so I see just so many opportunities and I think Val and the team here at the township have recognized that and we'll be working with the local to to have that that's you know super significant connection for sure I mean I think just one of the other things that kind of comes top of mind actually just engage if you will like a foodie who is going to be helping us write the food storytelling here in the township and one of the things that we're going to do it very well is we're going to be leveraging obviously this for now all of our local initiatives we're also going to be doing that in sound bytes with video clips for our website so just helps to paint the picture of an economy that people not only want to invest in but actually want to live in so to have that vibrant community where people want to have bring their families you know find their jobs located as a business and invest in their future great thanks for that all I got a question here from Meredith asking about the costs of rolling of the campaign and Meredith just for for the sake of today's webinar we're trying to keep things very informational at just sort of a base level of what is possible but I encourage you to get in touch with either Katcha or Val and Angie if you'd like to talk about any specific costing other question here we have is from Beth how do you implement a by local strategy within purchasing policy is there a good policy out there that's a really great question and I don't think there's any one policy part of the work that loco is trying to do on the more institutional government procurement side is to collect best practices and and really there's a lot of really great stories of how different municipalities and institutions have been able to integrate local purchasing into their procurement and in inventive ways by focusing a lot more less on local as a requirement partly because trade agreements make that difficult but focusing more on how can we shift procurement and modeling to be more focused on value for example versus and total value of purchases versus just like cost and things like that and so we work with several partners who have experience with that and we have connections with different procurement officers and different types of institutions and organizations that we can sort of reach out to with examples and we're continually trying to build those lessons and best practices the other thing that we are trying to do with the local impact assessment is use that as a tool to identify local businesses and also to identify gaps so as the assessment builds out we're talking to businesses we're using that as a leverage point to talk to businesses about who their suppliers are and we're also want to be able to use that as a tool to perhaps refer local suppliers to where an individual business or organization might have gaps but also then to look at that data that we're able to gather overall and see well are there gaps larger more systemic gaps that need to be filled like maybe we need to do capacity development in certain areas and that kind of thing so that's some of our broader work in the background that we're looking at Awesome, thanks Ketchum A question here from Manuel who asks do you create commercials for TV or radio that are available for communities to run via local TV or radio? Right now we don't do that for the campaign it's mostly a capacity resource capacity issue we do media outreach and we cross our fingers every time that they will come back to us and do some stories so whenever we do that kind of media outreach we really like to focus on highlighting businesses so for example with our press launch event for the BC by local campaign last December even for the last two years we've held like the actual event in the local business we invite local business owners from the community to be there and we refer the press to them when you know essentially we just want to get our why local stats out and then we want to talk to the actual business owners that's where the stories are Great and another follow up question from Manuel here Kies is there a difference between BC by local and by local BC? The by local BC campaign is it's not actually a campaign it's a program through the Ministry of Agriculture that provides funding to my understanding is agricultural food producers to market themselves as local and their goal is around expand their goal is similarly around expanding the market and sales for those businesses it's a separate funding we talk to the Ministry about it our campaign is broader and may we happen to be focused on eat local or all we are focused on all kinds of locally on businesses so they are separate programs although we are in touch with them yeah that's right catch it thanks for summarizing the government side of things there for me appreciate that and this is the last question we have here in the queue so if there are any other questions feel free to send them in we do still have about half an hour in today's webinar so plenty of time but the last question here asks you alluded to different kinds of local businesses small local independent businesses and larger businesses located in the community did the campaign involve both and how and I'm assuming this is directed more to Val and Angie it did come up during your presentation sure go ahead yeah I mean really I think we you know last year when in 2015 kind of looking at our initial activities there was a broad breach and so yes invariably we did reach some small businesses that had you know a handful of employees but we also reached out to organizations that you know around you know about 50 employees etc to make sure that we involve them as well and then beyond that as well because the large businesses in our community as well are key anchors and they're the ones that actually reach out and use the services of small business and some of the things that they have to offer so it was you know broad in reach and yeah so we kind of targeted them all not only on our own but through the business organizations themselves it was really good to see the uptake as Val said previously there was a really short window in which the township between the time the township sort of had approval to activate the campaign and the start of the campaign window and Val and her team worked really hard to engage with the business community and so I was really impressed to see sort of the uptake but I could see as the campaign ran on as as the campaign evolved more and more businesses were starting to pick up the torch and so that was really great to see where you know day one of the campaign you might have only seen a couple of people in the business wearing one of these buttons by day seven in the campaign all the staff was engaged and I was running into people you know in the supermarket who were wearing these buttons who I was giving them to customers who bought local product in my store and they were wearing them around the community so it was really great to see the momentum the campaign took on during the length of the campaign so I would suggest that you know although it might start a little bit small starting small is better than not starting at all so it seemed to pick up some momentum pretty quickly great thank you one other question that's come in here and this one's for me I think which doesn't happen too often but John asks is there a working group within the economic division that could assist developing a local program that would provide meals to regional hospitals grown raised processed and delivered locally John says something I know just a little bit about because I believe it is a question that I've been asked in the past and from what I understand and I should preface that there isn't anything specifically within our division that that would work or look at this sort of thing I think it would largely fall to either the ministry of health which is typically responsible for procuring that sort of thing through the hospitals or maybe even community sport and cultural development but as I understand one of the barriers to implementing that sort of thing has to do with trade regulation if I'm not mistaken I will follow up with you though John offline and make sure that I can get a concrete answer as to why this is or is not happening but it certainly seems to me like a good idea and Kashi you might have something to contribute there yeah there actually I believe that there is a pilot program that is looking at how to get more local food into hospitals on the island and I don't know at the top of my head who you know who actually is driving that initiative forward but I can follow up with you Josh and a couple of links to the people that have run that I believe it's still in pilot phase that would be great yeah because then I can pass that information onto John so thank you for that another question here from Bobby who asks will the BC by local expand to the Okanagan we're hoping to yes we're talking to some different partners in the Okanagan so far we haven't finalized any partners there but nature's fair market which is based out of Kelowna just joined on as a local member and will be participating in the social media side of the campaign a little bit and we've talked to different the chamber in Kelowna and some different business associations so it's mostly a question of resource resource availability on their end I think there's a lot of interest in the campaign in the Okanagan and we're just trying to figure out the right funding models to support it there great well I haven't seen any other questions come in so in the last 30 seconds here I think I will just say thank you so much Katya Val and Angie for coming together today and sharing their experiences with certainly not only the importance of buying local and the large economic impact that it has but your stories of success as well it was really inspiring to hear how well a program like local BC can work within communities to really boost the purchasing of local goods and what that can do to the local economy so thank you so much for joining us and sharing today and thanks to all our attendees for hanging in there we had quite a few of you on the line and you even stuck it out all the way through questions so thanks very much and unless there's anything else I'll say goodbye and we'll see you next time thank you Josh thanks Josh take care all bye