OUTLOOK 2015: Locate South Georgia looks to fully promote all aspects of the region

ALBANY — As many communities in southern Georgia continue to figure out ways to grow and attract new business and industry, a group of like-minded individuals from across the region have decided to pool their resources to form a newly christened Locate South Georgia initiative that will seek to use unity among a number of locations to present south Georgia as a great place to locate.

The new Locate South Georgia is a combination of two distinct groups that have long worked to promote different facets of the southern part of the state to those seeking a place to put down business roots where they know they can thrive.

Both an older version of Locate South Georgia and the Southwest Georgia Chamber Council put forth efforts in this vein but members within the two organizations realized they could achieve more by joining forces to spread the message of South Georgia.

“Really the old Locate South Georgia emphasized properties that are available and the new Locate South Georgia will be more about outreach; reaching out to decision makers in industry to let them know about the things that are here,” said Justin Strickland, vice chair of Locate South Georgia and President of the Albany Dougherty Economic Development Commission (EDC). “The Chamber group really contributed to the Georgia Quail Hunt and a legislative agenda every year, and that was the extent of what it did.”

For Strickland, and others who were involved with both groups, there seemed to be some common things the organizations were focused on and the overall geography was the same, so it made sense to figure out a way to combine the groups into one in order to be more effective.

“There was a lot of overlap with the two organizations,” said Strickland. “The iteration that you see now is the combination of two groups. Both groups were kind of standing alone and working to do things that promoted Southwest Georgia. We started talking about two years ago, ‘Maybe we should put these two groups together.’”

As it turned out, that group looked attractive to members of both so the new group wrote by-laws and created a new Locate South Georgia that would do the work of both groups and present a stronger, more unified front when trying to showcase the area to prospects.

“We have 20 counties who are participating and our goal being to promote Southwest Georgia on all fronts,” Strickland said. “We can go to Atlanta and meet with site selectors and project managers to better tell them about why Southwest Georgia’s a good place for industry, why we enjoy such a great quality of life and what makes it a competitive business location.

“To do it with the strength of the numbers that we have in Southwest Georgia only makes Southwest Georgia an easier sell when you’re pitching this as a location for industry and expansion.”

The new Locate South Georgia group, which officially came into existence on Jan. 1, encompasses a geography stretching across southern Georgia, from the Alabama and Florida state lines over to Douglas.

Strickland feels that by having such a large area of the state involved the group can truly leverage all of the things south Georgia has to attract new business and industry.

Others areas of the state have formed similar regional groups and have had success presenting themselves as a larger area that had a lot more to offer prospects.

“Columbus has a valley partnership, counties around Columbus,” said Strickland. “There’s a technology crescent that goes from Atlanta to Athens that joins together for marketing and there’s a coastal Georgia regional economic development marketing group. So there’s other groups doing it. That’s part of this, too. We can’t be left behind. We don’t want to let other regions of Georgia market themselves to the state, the nation, to the world, and nobody know about Southwest Georgia.”

In fact, like the other regional groups that have emerged recently, positioning to attract international business interest is keenly important as many companies only know about the Atlanta area and not about other parts of the state that have “plentiful land and plentiful water.”

Needing to compete with the presence of Atlanta is one of the reasons the group felt it needed to have a large membership area.

“A lot of international prospects know one thing about Georgia — Atlanta and the Atlanta airport. So for us to be able to showcase the number of employees and businesses and companies and the breadth of the different types of companies that are in southwest Georgia, it’s more powerful,” Strickland added. “It gives us a strategic marketing advantage to be able to do that. We know that regionalism is important.”

While Strickland acknowledges that, at first blush, having the same communities that are courting many of the same prospects make up the group might seem counterproductive, he’s quick to point out that many of the communities, including Albany and Dougherty County, were already working on regional initiatives.

Strickland said that the EDC had determined through its strategic planning that some kind of regional economic development group was critical. He also said that working together gives all the communities an opportunity to learn from one another.

“It wasn’t a tough sell,” said Strickland. “I think people realized once they stepped back and looked at it that it made sense. It’s interesting to watch everybody come together to work toward a common goal. We all want new jobs, new investment and our existing industries to expand, so it’s actually good for us to be able to learn from different communities and what they’re doing to promote themselves and how they want to promote the region. I think we’ll all benefit greatly from this regional effort.”

Another thing that Strickland feels is beneficial about having many communities involved, is the ability to for all of them to shoulder the financial load of the marketing efforts. Since many of the communities, especially the smaller ones, don’t have a lot of money for marketing it helps to spread that expense.

To that end, the group has built a dues structure accordingly. For communities with a population 25,000 or less, the annual cost is $1,000; for communities with a population size of 25,000-50,000, $2,500, and for communities with a population above 50,000, $5,000.

Now that the foundation of the organization has been formed, Strickland said the main focus of the organization in the coming months will be creating a definitive image or brand. Producing new marketing and informational collateral including designing a new website are top priorities.

Strickland said another focus for the coming months will be to present the new organization through different events staged both regionally and in Atlanta. Strickland said that although the details haven’t been finalized, the group is planning to host four events annually, two in Atlanta and two in south Georgia, to draw attention.

“We’re trying to plan to have two events in Atlanta and two events in south Georgia throughout this year,” Strickland said. “We will probably have a ‘developers day’ in Southwest Georgia in the spring and we’ll also have an event in Atlanta to re-introduce the new identity of this group at some point early spring.”

While the group is hard at work on new website design, the domain will be the same as the current Locate South Georgia website www.locatesouthgeorgia.com, which already includes important information for prospects looking at south Georgia.

“It’s been a lot of work to get to this point, but you can see the benefits of the work in bringing people together to plan for the future of southwest Georgia from an economic development standpoint,” said Strickland. “It’s an all-encompassing regional effort.”