John Glynn-Morris and I had the privilege of co-facilitating this year’s Design Jam Local (DJL) organized by TechYukon and Yukonstruct. This post is a detailed breakdown of the event and includes a summary of the ideas that were pitched during the challenge.
What is and Why Design Jam Local?
DJL is an annual ideation challenge organized in Yukon. It is similar to a tech hackathon, but with less focus on building, and instead, more focus on ideation, collaboration, and problem validation.
This year, in conjunction with Yukon Innovation Week, DJL was organized to address the impact of COVID-19 on Whitehorse’s small business & tourism community. Ideas that were pitched addressed either:
Tourism
To help travel-related businesses address the travel restrictions, decrease demand, and move to virtual.
Buy local
With local lockdowns, consumers have shifted spending to online vendors, this has negatively impacted many local businesses who aren’t set up for e-commerce. Many existing online vendors are also outside of Yukon, this results in spending that is not being recirculated within the local community.
Traditional push oriented Buy Local campaigns guilt consumers into buying local without giving clear justification or motivation on why it was important. We were looking for pull oriented ideas that would encourage and assist local businesses with improving themselves to better address local consumer demand and make consumers want to buy locally.
The Logistics
By the numbers
33 registrations
21 attended
15 ideas pitched
3 teams
24-hours
$1,200 in prizes purchased from local businesses
The Ideas
Top 3:
1st Place: Fish Where The Fish Are
A series of educational workshops to support local businesses with improving their virtual presence. This would facilitate local buying and also improve the visitor experience for tourists.
Topics could include: setting up your online presence, SEO, e-commerce, digital marketing, social media, and building customer loyalty.
Why they won:
- The idea was simple and easy enough to be implemented immediately. It would produce positive impact and help local businesses see an immediate gain.
- Despite being a short program, it would also leave a lasting impact that would benefit business owners beyond the current pandemic.
2nd Place: #giveyukonnow #exploreyukonlater
An app that would allow people to purchase and gift the Yukon experience to friends and family.
People would pay for their trips or secure them with a deposit, begin planning through the app, then book later once they felt comfortable or ready to travel again. This would give tour operators, hotels, and many other businesses the immediate cash flow to tide them over.
Risk: It would help with immediate cash flow, but would mean that operators would have to service these customers in the future with no cashflow. To manage this, operators would limit the # of bookings that they would provide through this app to ensure that they could still service new visitors once travel restrictions open up again. The idea is that it would not only replace revenue, but also increase overall revenue as there would be more demand in the future.
It would initially be funded through the government, the Tourism Industry Association, or through a small commission off the bookings (the team wanted to minimize this in order to best serve local businesses in this current COVID-19 environment). Commission could be increased in the future once the crisis is behind us.
Why they didn’t win:
- I believe it was the best pitch of the weekend, but the main reason they didn’t win was because they pitched it as an app.
- The app marketplace is crowded, it’s hard to convince someone to download and keep a single-purpose app installed on their phone.
- It would have been better to pitch it as a website/web app or as a marketing campaign.
- It would have taken too long to implement (an app would take 1-6 months to develop and this would be a little too late to add immediate value to businesses that need a solution, now).
- Perhaps trying to do too much. By marrying 3 different ideas, it made for a very interesting pitch but it overcomplicated execution.
- Facilitating the gifting experience so that people could buy and give the Yukon adventure to others.
- Coordinating businesses for the campaign to collaborate on packages.
- Trip curation and planning features.
- Managing bookings and capacity.
Definitely still a great idea and something that should be implemented in the long run!
3rd Place: Experience Yukon
Aggregating local businesses into a website and magazine. Many operators and activities are marketed towards visitors, this would be aimed towards Yukoners to encourage buying local.
This idea started as a bigger idea to run an annual cultural event that would attract outsiders and further increase the exposure of Yukon (like the Calgary Stampede, Burning Man Festival or SXSW). The team probably moved away from this because of concerns about attracting the wrong crowd and causing unintended environmental and community impact.
Why they didn’t win:
The biggest drawback was the funding & sustainability of this project. It would rely on sponsorship/advertising from businesses, but that would be difficult because:
- Businesses did not have the cash flow to support this.
- It’s hard to push advertising if you have no guarantee of an audience or the return on investment (conversion).
Misc ideas that did not make it past team formation:
- CRM for chambers: Implement a dynamic database to better facilitate, manage, and track referrals between local businesses.
- COVID Bonds: A fiscal policy idea whereby the government would sell bonds (much like war bonds) that would allow for the investment of capital into projects that would benefit the local tourism sector in the long run. These projects would also boost current activity and cash flow by encouraging existing businesses to repurpose themselves to service them.
- 10 x 10: A marketing campaign focused around stay-cations, 10 stay-cations featuring 10 businesses. Activities could be as short as 4-hours or even multi-day.
- Loyalty program/card: That could be used across multiple local businesses to encourage local spending.
- Promoting attractions: Using VR/AR installations at the airport (or through producing content that would be consumed at home). This would better promote the main attractions when travel is enabled again and help create more demand by further exposing Yukon.
- Geotagging: Detailed map that would allow visiting anglers and Yukon beginners to more easily find out what is where for fishing opportunities.
- Supply chain management: Figure out how we can make it more efficient/easy to get things up to Yukon.
- What can we export instead of import?
- Booking platform for tour operators: To help them with managing group bookings and meeting the minimum required group sizes.
- Starting activity-oriented associations: This would improve local buying because
- Association members tend to frequently ask and share referrals of local businesses with other members.
- These associations would be targetted towards activities that locals enjoy.
- People shop with local vendors not just because of the product, but also because of the experience. They seek expert advice from vendors who can recommend the right products that suit their needs.
- e.g. 4×4 association of BC frequently has posts from members soliciting recommendations for the best mechanic, best tire products, etc.
Bonus: Here a few pictures from our Scavenger Hunt icebreaker activity!
I’d love to continue supporting the teams and community!
There were many great ideas, I’d love to help turn them into reality:
- Happy to provide light ongoing mentorship if anyone is interested in moving forward with the ideas.
- For the workshops that aim to help businesses with improving their virtual presence, I’m happy to put together a schedule and source facilitators (my network is in Vancouver, it would be better if there are local facilitators who can do this too).
- For #giveyukon #exploreyukonlater, there might also be locals who are suitable for this, but if no one steps up to the plate and there is a desire to build an app like this, I’m happy to be a project manager and help get this off the ground.
- If any of the chambers would like to explore implementing a robust CRM/referral database, I can assist with setting that up.
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