WCG|2012 – Can’t wait for what’s next!

It’s a little hard to wrap our heads around the fact that the 2012 World Choir Games is over.  We have lived with this event as a company for more than two years.  For me, as the former Board Chair of the Cincinnati USA Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB), it is closer to four years.

An American choir in the WCG|2012 Parade of Nations on July 10, 2012 in downtown Cincinnati

So, what did this incredible, beautiful and historic event mean for our community and for our agency?  It depends and only time will tell.

For our community, a sense of unity, common purpose and pride – a killer combination – led to unforgettable experiences.  I am forever hopeful that it will also lead to a greater willingness to speak more freely and openly about how good and deserving we are as a community.

We are a proud yet humble town.  Too often we let our successes go unheralded and our critics (usually from among us) go unchallenged.  It feels good to do a great thing and we should be proud of what all of us accomplished these past two weeks.  Even more importantly, we should let it propel us to do more great things.

Ultimately, how realizing such success with the 2012 World Choir Games will make us better as a community – as a place to live, work, play and learn, as a destination for meetings and conventions and other events – will depend on how we leverage the experience of the past two weeks.

As an agency, Vehr Communications learned much about ourselves and even more about what we do for our clients.

We learned that we can, should and must partner with others to achieve big objectives.  True partnerships with the Cincinnati USA CVB, event media partners, sponsors, volunteers, government officials and more led to incredible awareness and understanding of a beautiful, yet admittedly complicated event.

Without question, the community responded to traditional and social media – a fully integrated and strategic program of communication – to learn about the event and happenings on a daily, even hourly, basis.  We partnered with good and smart people.

We planned for and implemented a most sophisticated and successful social media program.  It helped us to communicate changes, answer questions, manage overflow crowds, enhance the consumer experience, and add to the overall success of the event.  In other words, it was designed to support our business objectives and that is precisely what it did.

The response we saw from this community was, at times, overwhelming.  Nearly every ticket that we could sell was sold.  Many, many events had long lines and overflowing crowds.  The scene on Fountain Square for the Celebration of Nations Parade on July 10 on Fountain Square was historic and incomparable … estimated attendance ranges from 15,000 to 25,000, or more.

Without question, we are smarter and more experienced for organizing and participating in the Games.  This will be good for our current and future clients; precisely how good depends on the business objectives we are engaged to help them achieve.

So, we’re a little tired (ok, really tired), a lot smarter and darned proud of what just happened in Cincinnati USA.  We know it has made us better as an agency.  We can’t wait to see what comes next.