success stories

Small Community Gets Big Results with Destination 3000.

The first county to be named after America's first President, Washington County, Pennsylvania has become a growth area for the state as the home of three colleges, a major university, and countless tourist and shopping attractions.

In charge of heralding the benefits of visiting, living and working in the area is the Washington County Tourism Promotion Agency. The agency promotes tourism into the county and has a number of commercial and local members to which it provides promotional services. Recently, Washington County made an investment in a popular software solution developed by Software Management Inc. (SMI), another southwestern Pennsylvania-based business.

J.R. Shaw is the Executive Director of the Washington County Tourism Promotion Agency and explains that one of his biggest challenges is communicating with the organization's members and community leaders about the activities of his team. This is second only to deploying targeted marketing to visitors – many of whom are very different in their motive for visiting. Since the area is home to many attractions, from a popular casino to multiple universities, keeping in touch can be a challenge.

SMI's Director of Sales & Marketing Paul Franke, Jr. says they actually have many smaller organizations as clients, and D3000 is perfect for organizations like Shaw's with many communications goals and smaller offices. "In many ways it can be particularly helpful in a small office since it does a lot of the heavy-lifting when it comes to database organization and marketing deployment," Franke explains. "It also helps that Washington County is in our own backyard, so we are able to help our local economy by supporting tourism in the area."

 At first, Shaw's perception was that Destination 3000 Professional™ (D3000) was too large of a program for their small organization – quickly he learned that was not the case, and the benefits of the solution were immediately realized.

"Prior to this, everything we knew about our visitors as well as our membership directory was all kept in traditional applications, like Excel," he explains. "It wasn't until after the implementation that we really saw how much D3000 brings to the table. A benefit to us is our ability to now track and measure the return on investments made by our agency and how it benefits our members and the community. I can now track the success of specific programs such as our website and mobile applications – before there was no way to do that. Also, the program allows us to be better marketers because we can track and target marketing pieces to specific visitors.