How Communities Get Noticed in an AI-Driven World

But can you start off by just telling us a little bit about Golden Shovel? I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar, but just a little bit about you all and what you help groups in our space do.

So Golden Shovel Agency is a full-service economic development strategy and communications firm.

We have been in the economic development space for 17 years.

That's all that we do.

And one of the things that makes Golden Shovel so unique is that we view ourselves not just as a service provider, but as a thought leader, someone who's going to gather and share best practices and industry trends with the overall community.

So if you go to goldenshovelagency.com and you go to our resource learning library, you can get access to free original research and white papers and webinar content.

A lot of best practices because we believe that our job is to help economic developers create thriving communities.

And we do that through, of course, the research, through strategy development, and through communication channels like website, video, PR, social media, ads, things of that nature.

Love that.

And I know you've been part of the team for a while and I think have moved up over time into your role leading the team.

I'd love to hear a little bit about how have you seen the field change? And I know that Golden Shovel has also grown from what I gather from being more focused specifically on websites and really grown that to be bigger picture.

So maybe those journeys tie together, but would love to hear about both.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Golden Shovel originally was founded as a tech company, and we still are.

We have an in-house development team who is always looking at what's happening in the industry and how can we use technology to support our clients and their missions.

And so we developed the Economic Gateway Platform, which is the only custom CMS that was built specifically for economic development, because again, we don't do anything else.

And with our shared development approach, it means that If you are someone in a rural community of 15,000, and maybe it's just you and an intern in your economic development office, if someone in the state of Connecticut asks for something to be developed because they're seeing something on a global scale, on a statewide scale, you get access to those same tools.

Those same communication tools.

So that's a really been an interesting thing about our organization is that we're able to give people access to the latest and greatest ways of communicating and displaying data and sharing information that they didn't even know they needed.

Right.

So we're able to provide that much faster than people realize.

And one of the things that we noticed is when we would come in and work with a community, very often we were the only third party outside provider that they were working with.

And so they kept coming to us for not just a solution for like a website, but how do we market a site that we spent all this time and money developing, right? So we developed an entire video production team and we actually pioneered virtual reality online.

for economic development.

We were the first company to do 360 fam tours and 360 site tours.