As misleading as the title may be, Challenge Detroit fellows did not go shopping, but rather learned some vital Detroit history surrounding the Livernois Avenue of Fashion. Throughout the month of February, Challenge Detroit had the opportunity to work with the Detroit Collaborative Design Center and their initiative, Impact Detroit. Impact Detroit has spent the last year working towards activating the Livernois commercial corridor in partnership with the Livernois Working Group. Our challenge was to help plan, prepare for, and market a corridor-wide event that will mark the opening of their Livernois store-front activation.The Challenge Detroit fellows were divided among the following teams: Marketing/Social Media, Videography, Economic Development, Event Planning, Documentation and Graphic Design. Each team proved vital to the project outcomes and presentation.
The Livernois Community Storefront’s mission is to be a pivot point to channel Detroit’s growing momentum in hopes to propel the Livernois Corridor forward through community driven initiatives. It will act as a temporary hub for community education and action planning. Visitors will be able to use the space to learn about the businesses currently supporting the corridor, the history of the neighborhood, and collaborate with others to dream and make action plans for the future. In April, the community wide weekend kick-off event will highlight Livernois’s past and present and be a space to imagine and plan for the future of the Livernois commercial corridor.
The Livernois Community Storefront (LCS) has the potential to harness the energy surrounding Midtown, Downtown, and Corktown and redirect that energy to the Avenue of Fashion. Many neighborhoods in the city of Detroit have a lot to offer but there can be more honest and positive attention to promote these areas. This is exactly why marketing is vital, to not only the community event and the Livernois Community Storefront; but also, the entire Avenue of Fashion.
The social media and marketing team created a plan for the corridor businesses and the DCDC Impact Detroit team to advertise the event via press, print, radio and social media. All these channels are a way to get the community involved to spread the word through grassroots and innovative methods. Through the work the economic development team did with the Impact Detroit team, we discovered that many businesses owners could use resources on how to properly leverage social media to bolster their business and promote the Avenue of Fashion as a premium destination in Detroit. Many business owners, recognizing the missed opportunity, expressed interest in social media workshops to help them develop the right skills and knowledge base to begin making a social media imprint. Our team left behind a toolkit to help business owners better understand the importance of social media and to take them step-by-step through the process of setting up a Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram profile which will be distributed by Impact Detroit. The work we did on the social media and marketing team was just one aspect of the project in conjunction with planning the storefront community event, creating videos of the businesses on the Livernois corridor as well as a toolkit documenting the process of activating a storefront.
It is often hard to gauge the success of our challenges but this month proved to be an instant success. On our last Friday of the month-long challenge, our group of fellows presented our project to local business owners, students, professors, and other Detroit and Livernois stakeholders. When a business owner on Livernois, whose input we garnered during our project, stood up and thanked us for our work, we knew we did something right. The Avenue of Fashion just gained 30 more committed stakeholders and we now charge you to go explore Livernois and all it has to offer.
(Photo credit: Spencer Jaskiewicz of ImpactDetroit)
FB: facebook.com/LivernoisCommunityStorefront
Contributed by fellows Betsy Berens, Asia Gholston, Brittany Sanders, and Leigh Ann Ulrey (Social Media and Marketing team members from the Impact Detroit Challenge)