[OMS_MANAGERS] Downtown Holiday events during COVID

[Downtown Bend, OR]

Greetings,

I wanted to reach out today and share with you some of our thoughts and
ideas for the upcoming holiday season, and request your thoughts, feedback,
and ideas.  Thanks!

*Halloween/Trick-or-Treating*
We are canceling our in-person event.  Instead, we are hosting an online
costume contest (with awards) and a month-long Downtown Halloween scavenger
hunt (with awards).  Plus, we'll be promoting anything that our businesses
are doing something special (ie-giving out 'treats' with any online or
in-person purchase).

*Ladies Night*
We always host a Ladies' Night in November, and it's a huge success.
Normally, participating businesses would have food, drinks, and discounts
from 5-7 on a Thursday night.   This year, we're considering hosting an
online-only event. We'd ask bars and breweries to pre-package cocktails and
growlers to sell the two days before the event, and restaurants to make
special discounted to-go desserts (that people can enjoy at home), then on
the evening of the event, all discounts and free gifts would be offered for
any online, phone, text, or email purchases made during the event hours.
We're event considering hosting a Zoom 'party' where ladies can drink
together and share stories about their purchases.  Thoughts?  Ideas?
Feedback?

*Shop Small Saturday*
Normally, as an AMEX Neighborhood Champian, we host a booth in Downtown
Bend where we hand out passports and we usually have over 60 businesses
that participate in stamping the passports.  We gather donations from all
of the participating businesses, arrange them into prize packages and award
them to random winners that participated in the Shop Small passport event.
This year, we are (again) considering moving this event online due to the
COVID restrictions.  We'd give out all of the AMEX swag to businesses to
give to their customers, and we'd still collect donations from
participating shops to create prize baskets - but this year we'd have our
community participate by submitting their receipts - each receipt (for
online or in-person shopping) would be an entry to the prize raffle.
Thoughts?  Feedback?

*Community Tree Lighting*
Normally, this is a big event with Santa, the mayor, local celebrities, and
a couple of thousand people who could down to the lighting of the community
tree.  This year, we're trying to get a local station to live stream the
event, and we'd encourage everyone to count down to the tree lighting from
their own living rooms.  We'd like to make it more interactive than that,
but we don't have any ideas to do so (yet!).

*Santa Visits*
- Canceled


Please let our team know if you have any thoughts or ideas that we can use.
Thanks so much for 2cents!

I hope that all of you are hanging in there during these strange times. Be
well,
Mindy Aisling
Executive Director
--------------------

*Downtown Bend Business Association*
Talk or Text - 541-788-3628    www.downtownbend.org
916 NW Wall Street in Downtown Bend Oregon

*We are a nonprofit committed to increasing the vitality of Downtown Bend.*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://omls.oregon.gov/pipermail/oms_managers/attachments/20200916/9e2af7c7/attachment.html>