Brookfield has renewed its partnership with Visit Oak Park, an Illinois-certified tourism bureau with an aim to attract visitors to the village through social media and search engine optimization.
At the village board’s June 24 committee of the whole meeting, trustees heard a presentation from Annie Coakley, Visit Oak Park’s executive director, before deciding to partner with the organization again at a $5,000 cost to the village. The decision came after Coakley said Visit Oak Park is looking into reimagining its name and branding with the help of an outside firm, which will start work on that project in July.
It is not clear from the presentation or village documents how long the renewed partnership will last. Brookfield has worked with Visit Oak Park since at least 2019, when the village directed the firm to create a unique tourism webpage for it.
In her presentation, Coakley said that in the world of tourism, a person’s first visit to any place is called the “first dance of economic development.”
“No one moves to a community, or hardly anyone, that hasn’t visited it first, or opens a business in a community that they haven’t visited, so it starts with a visit,” she said. As a village attracts new visitors, some will decide to move there, start businesses there or invest in the local community, which will draw even more visitors in a cycle.
Coakley explained to trustees that in 2024, Visit Oak Park is aiming to focus on its social media metrics and work with influencers to ensure that its content – promoting villages such as Brookfield – outpaces content from other tourism bureaus in Illinois, such as Discover DuPage. She said that using data provided by Cook County, Visit Oak Park is able to track visits to the area alongside using its own data to track online clicks and views.
“We use that data to help us meet the visitor where they’re at,” Coakley said. “We want to attract, engage and delight a visitor or potential visitor to come to this region and spend their money.”
She said the organization especially uses its blog content to spotlight the villages it represents, making sure to publish three blogs each week. It also researches the best keywords to use in its posts and tries to use each post’s keyword at least 10 times in the post.
“No other [destination marketing organization] is doing that. They might write one or two for the whole month, and we have 12 out,” she said. “The reason we do that is because 93% of our website traffic is coming from these blogs.”
Coakley said the value of Visit Oak Park’s blog posts have grown from being worth $79,200 in 2022 to $197,200 in May 2024, representing “unprecedented” growth.
Visit Oak Park’s other leg up, Coakley said, is a public relations firm it keeps on retainer. Using the PR firm, the organization has been able to secure “earned media” — news reports on TV or newspaper articles like this one — for businesses in Brookfield.
For example, last year, Visit Oak Park secured a Brookfield business’s spot on “Around Town,” a broadcast segment on Chicago’s WGN news channel hosted by reporter Ana Belaval.
“Just in terms of [return on investment] on that specifically, the ad-equivalency of being on that show is $670 for every 30 seconds, and we had eight minutes of live TV on that show with an audience of 878,000,” Coakley said.
Coakley also showed off Visit Oak Park’s promotional videos featuring businesses in Brookfield and other villages that it promotes. The videos are split into categories like “makers,” “things to do outside,” “street festivals” and more, and each shows off a handful of businesses from around the area.
After Coakley’s presentation, members of the village board lauded the organization and voiced their approval for partnering with it again.
“I love that it is both featuring Brookfield businesses and the community and tying us into the larger region,” Trustee Nicole Gilhooley said.
“I think we share a similar view about visits, getting people to visit. Everything from our concerts on Grand Boulevard and our concerts in the park, we feel if we can get people here, and they see our village and see our town and walk by this and see this, we can get them to come back,” Village President Michael Garvey said.
