Promote the community’s success stories and accomplishments through Wisconsin and Midwestern media platforms, including social media, through a regional strategic marketing and communications plan.
Fond du Lac is a community with a tremendous amount of recent success and a compelling story to tell, but it needs to more assertively tell that story to a larger audience. With examples ranging from the Children’s Museum, to the Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts, to the Library expansion, to the joint YMCA/ Boys and Girls Club facility, to Marian University and Agnesian Healthcare moving downtown to the AC Nielsen building, Fond du Lac is accomplishing big things despite being a small-town. There are a number of organizations and entities in Fond du Lac that promote their ongoing work and activities, but the larger story is not cracking through to a broader Wisconsin audience.
Throughout outreach we heard that Fond du Lac is somewhat at the mercy of Green Bay, Madison, and Milwaukee television and radio outlets, and that only “bad news” about crime and job losses make their way onto the airwaves. Although Fond du Lac has The Reporter and KFIZ News Talk 1450 locally, much of the community turns to social media for their news, where coverage can be equally ugly. The strategy must be to leverage the critical mass and bulk-weight impact of everyone across the Fond du Lac community working together to crack through the noise, establish relationships with media outlets throughout Wisconsin, and get the area’s story out. That approach must be coordinated and produce sustained momentum.
