Regional Certified Site Application

In 2023 the County of Grande Prairie established a comprehensive and competitive certified site program and marketing platform which has improved the ability of local landowners and developers to bring shovel-ready sites to market and provide a marketing platform to promote these sites to the specific target markets.

The County of Grande Prairie’s Certified Site Program provides a designation to properties that fulfill predetermined program requirements. The factors chosen were validated with input from local real estate professionals and economic development staff and built off the success of other select state and provincial-certified site programs particularly the approach used by the Province of Ontario.

The program has been successfully utilized to promote the County with local Canadian developers, our recently hosted site selector forum in May of 2024 and at international conferences in Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo and Seoul.

Regionally the same challenges exist, a lack of awareness of opportunities and shovel-ready sites still impacted the broader region’s ability to really pursue new investments.  Many of the smaller (27) communities that are members of the Peace Region Economic Alliance (PREDA) do not have the staff capacity or budgets to build these types of projects. To expand the program and improve access, the County of Grande Prairie partnered with PREDA to apply for a Northern Regional Economic Development grant from the Province of Alberta’s Ministry of Jobs Economy and Trade to develop an application that would allow all the communities in the region utilize the certified site program.

Transitioning the hosting of the County’s website to HubSpot allowed our team and consultants Tangible Words to develop an application that gives any community access to the required calculations to certify a site under our program. The fully web-based tool allows any community to access the requirements of our program and enter in their site data in an easy to use webform which sends the score directly to the community improving access to the program. Once certified any community can simply upload their site descriptions to their website and confidently promote them as certified.

The certified site program has dramatically expanded the economic development capacity in our regions ability to support our local developers and landowners by improving their investment readiness and our proactive marketing activities. By developing a branded certified site program, our team has been able to provide a scalable platform for promoting sites throughout the region and support fast-tracking new investments, modernizing our investment attraction activities.

How do we keep the site/media current and up to date sustainably?

We limit the number of sites we certify and promote to on our website to 10 to support the ease of continued updating, the project is not designed to promote all the sites in the region just those that meet our criteria for investment readiness. We have suggested to our community partners to update their sites as they sell, which with the new tool is a process that requires less than an hour of staff time. We have also used the tool to support maintaining data integrity as shown in this video Keeping Your CRM Clean With the Weightings Tool | Berrycast.