My Main Street & Digital Main Street Business Spotlights
The City of St. Catharines is proud to submit our video series highlighting My Main Street and Digital Main Street Grant Recipients. The central premise for this series was too promote the diverse collection of businesses and business owners, while providing these business owners the opportunity to take centre stage and tell their experiences with post pandemic recovery via existing grant programs. Through many of these videos, St. Catharines’ business owners have championed these programs efforts to ensure equal access to opportunities especially in cases where they have faced systemic barriers to similar programs.
Purpose of Project
The intent of this series was to allow for our selection of grant recipients to effectively tell their stories, so that business owners here in St. Catharines can not only more directly relate with the series, but also so that through their words we could more effectively spread awareness of each program and the benefits offered through them. With this guiding intent, selections were made to ensure the most impactful stories could be told, with a focus on those which will be the most emotionally stimulating. In addition, throughout this series, the City of St. Catharines’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion is showcased not only by the words of the business owners themselves, but also through the efforts to target traditionally underserved communities in the Downtown and Merritton / Queenston business areas.
Several themes are carried across each video in this series such as:
- Emphasis on core impact from non-repayable funding contribution opportunities (ie. Allowing grant recipients to say specifically what they used their funds for and the direct impact they have been able to see since)
- Promotion of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion across different communities in the City
- Through subthemes such as community and Covid-19 related economic recovery, this campaign was able to bring viewers into the lived experiences of entrepreneurs and business owners here in St. Catharines
Target Audience (demographics)
- Catharines based business owners
- Program partners
- Industry partners
Results
From this campaign, a total of 6 separate testimonials were collected in video format, which have been since used in a variety of ways. The four videos focused on My Main Street grant recipients have been used as a conclusion to the 2022/2023 My Main Street Local Business Accelerator program, which was covered across InvestInSTC social media pages and on our website as an article titled “St. Catharines supports BIPOC, women-led and LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs with the My Main Street program”. The two videos which highlighted Digital Main Street Digital Transformation Grant recipients will be added in their entirety to our InvestInSTC LinkedIn page and will be cut to shorter lengths for usage as “reels” on our associated Instagram and Facebook pages.
Links to examples of social media posts:
