Causes: Economic Development, Urban & Community Economic Development

Mission: To sell, market and promote the destination columbus, ohio experience to visitors.

Programs: Convention sales:booked 324 conventions, meetings, trade shows, and events. Conducted 72 site visits for meeting professionals, representing a total of 262,989 room nights in future business. Exhibited and/or participated in 35 industry trade shows, events, and sales missions to generate leads for future business. Submitted bids for both the 2016 republican and democratic national conventions.

marketing/communications:objectives were to create awareness and destination consideration among the primary target audience segments in conjunction with integrated public relations and social media plans, protect and expand market share among core drive markets, drive traffic to landing pages on our website for package bookings and generate leads. For convention advertising, targeted the chicago and dc assocation market, asae, pcma, and osae. Hosted 67 travel journalists. Launched "lifeincbus" - an image campaign in dc and chicago. Worked with a leading research firm to gauge what the country thinks about columbus. The organization's website recorded 831,633 unique visits in 2014.

sports marketing:purpose is to promote, attract, and service amateur sporting events for greater columbus, ohio. The organization hosted and booked many high profile events, including the arnold sports festival, the cap city half marathon, three ncaa tournament events in diving, fencing, and track and field, and 13 ohio high school athletic association state championships. The organization also hosted the usa fencing national championships. Columbus was awarded the ncaa women's final four in 2018. Columbus also submitted an official bid to host the cleveland browns training camp in 2015 and beyond.