Official Website of the Greater Pine Island Chamber of Commerce

 PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

 JUNE 2008

Greater Pine Island Chamber of Commerce getting ready for Winter.

For the past number of years the GPICC has been marketing Pine Island as Florida’s Creative Coast and as part of that endeavor have created and promoted two ‘Creative Coast Weekends’.

The purpose of these events is to promote Pine Island and our member businesses and as a bonus be a small fund raiser for GPICC.

The first weekend is in November and has promoted the art galleries, music on Pine Island and the SW FL Music Festival. The second weekend is in January and last year focused on Arts, Authors and Archeology.

We are looking for a team of people to put this year’s campaign together.

The November event entails coordination with Island galleries for their November promotion, be it Art Night, Extended hours promotion, gallery openings etc.as well as coordination with the Matlacha Mariners who organize the SW FL music festival.

In the past GPICC has purely assisted these two organizations with marketing their events out of the tri county area; including the production of a brochure, web site and banner advertising campaign.  The chamber has also had a booth at the festival selling t- shirts, handing out info, etc. The focus of the marketing campaign was to come enjoy our island accommodations, restaurants with and without music, galleries, gift shops etc.

To give this year’s promotion a twist, it would be nice for a business or group of businesses to “co sponsor” the November campaign and add to its appeal. It is up to the members who take on this project how they wish to add to the event and extend its scope. Previous ventures have included workshops on the Saturday featuring song writing, artist demos etc. Trolley tours to the various galleries were tried one year.

The January event has promoted 3 different creative fields. Again we worked with the island galleries to assist with Friday promotions. For Saturday, Artists were invited to paint at the site. Authors were invited to speak, sign, sell their books and the event was held at the Randell site to include Archeological tours and lectures. Crafters, food and beer and music were on site also.

GPICC coordinated the whole weekend with a team of members taking on different facets of the event.

The format for this year is undecided however we would like to continue along the same theme as the event last year appeared to be gathering momentum.

Initial thoughts include the artists and authors again with possibly the addition of an art auction. Hopefully we can link with Randell again and include the archeological theme. Again the overall format will be decided by the members who help put it together.

Our executive director, Lisa, will be the event coordinator and work closely with the team as the weekends develop.

Check out our website.   www.floridascreativecoast.com , to see what we did last year.

Please call or e mail Lisa if you wish to be a part of this year’s marketing promotion of our island and can help us come up with some exciting new ideas.

Cynthia Welch

President GPICC

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Cynthia Welch

President GPICC