Lower Manhattan Placemaking Strategy

When you’re the home of the Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn Bridge, World Trade Center Memorial, and Wall Street… how do you strategically plan your own placemaking and measure your impact?

The district had already been doing placemaking for years. When faced with choosing between a CreOs installation, a pop-up concert series, or a full blown festival — how could they evaluate the impacts in advance, know which KPIs they were hitting, and which activation made the most sense for Alliance’s needs?

“Nothing but positive feedback from colleagues across the organization. We now have a great set of tools to effectively and strategically implement an aggressive placemaking agenda.”

-Josh Nachowitz
Senior Vice President

APPROACH
Bright Brothers tapped our network of UPMO partners to join forces with us and added Starkey Strategies to the mix. With years of both agency- and practitioner-side- experience, we flew to Manhattan to meet the team and perform discovery and intake to understand better the challenges, obstacles, and stumbling blocks for the Alliance.

 

SOLUTION
Bright Brothers went beyond simple surveys and internal team meetings. Community engagement was front and center in our approach, including stakeholders, board members, property owners, creatives, business owners, and residents to understand what worked, what didn’t andhow the Alliance could improve their planning, execution and measurement.

Bright Brothers developed for the district a custom placemaking Toolkit that included:

  • Processes and planning tools including a visionary “North Star” statement.
  • Four “Placemaking Pillars” to strategically define the motivations, reasons, goals and answer “the why” (are we doing this).
  • A Placemaking Matrix designed to evaluate one activation over another, and assign a quantifiable numeric score to compare, contrast and judge various placemaking concepts before committing precious budgets.
  • Internal briefs to guide the planning and execution process, while coordinating with the MarCom and Operations teams.
  • Methods & Metrics for evaluation including the right kinds of KPIs to measure efforts, specifically from an economic impact POV.
  • A Post Mortem evaluation tool to drive a feedback loop that documents wins, losses, missed opportunities and means for continual improvement of efforts by the district.
  • Appendices including additional thoughts, considerations, funding mechanisms and tools for improving efforts over time.