All right, good afternoon, everybody.

Welcome to study session today.

Um, we have several items on our agenda before we review the agenda.

First up is Mark Eichmann with the CBB annual report.

Mark, if you'll come on up and just hit the button, please.

Thank you.

Mayor Shudak, Council members, thank you so much for the opportunity to present the unleash Council Bluff's fiscal year 2026 annual report.

Jody was the guy to make sure that each of you have a pocket folder on the left hand side.

You're gonna find the 12-page detailed annual report.

On the right hand side, you're gonna see a copy of the PowerPoint slides.

I'm gonna go through, and then behind that is the 2026 uh council bluffs and Pottawatomie County Inspirational Guide.

With me here today are some board members.

First of all, board president Ashley Cruz, along with board members Vanessa DuBlace, along with Len Friedenbach as well as Brian Shea.

And then I have staff members, director of marketing, Craig Carlson, along with director of sales, Kathy Rosine.

I'm gonna jump into where you have heard me talk a lot before, and that is what is our focus?

Why do you fund us?

And it's all about trying to attract new customers to local businesses.

New customers that come in the form of visitors that have traveled at least 50 miles or farther to come to Council Bluffs.

And when they arrive, almost all of them become new taxpayers for local government, because if they stay overnight, we certainly want them to, they're gonna pay the 7% hotel-motel tax.

And when you add those two benefits together, they equal one for all local residents.

So while we might be outwardly facing inviting strangers to town, as you've heard me say before, we're doing it with a decidedly local purpose in mind of supporting local businesses, local government, and all local residents.

Now, what did those new customers represent?

Uh, according to the most recent data that we have from tourism economics in calendar year 2024, they spent more than 334 million dollars in Pottawatomie County.

Those new taxpayers represented uh as recently as fiscal year 2026, 3.376 million dollars.

That's the third highest the city has ever collected, six percent higher than fiscal year 2025.

This is the fifth year that we, or I should say the city has collected uh more than three million, actually almost three point two million dollars for the last five years.

And so as you take a glance at the look back there for 11 years, you can see that we've come a long ways.

The next thing I usually touch on is what did unleash council bluffs have to do with this, and it all has to do with digital marketing.

Uh we have to go where the customer is or the prospective customer is, and they're out there researching their options, looking for places to go, things to do, and we reach them uh through digital media, uh, whether it's advertising on social media, through other digital platforms using Google.

We get out there and get after them.

And about a year ago, we started partnering with a new agency, Sojourn, which has a global reach but is actually headquartered just across the river in Omaha, and they're considered a proven travel marketing specialist when it comes to getting that audience and enticing them.

Last summer is when we first started working with them, starting on July 1, running through Halloween.

We learned a lot through that process.

Uh then we paused things and we went back to doing some winter advertising.

Uh, this is the fourth consecutive year that we've done that, making Council Bluffs in Pottawatomie County a year-round destination, working with Pottawatomy Conservation, the Western Iowa Development Association, Pottawatomi Tourism Committee, and we also engaged the Iowa Tourism Office with a $10,000 grant to help fund that particular two-month-long marketing campaign.

Uh, comparing it to the year before, we outperformed that in several different metrics.

Then we went ahead and took a couple of days off and then engaged the audience with a spring and summer campaign starting on March 10th, ran it through the end of uh June.

That is, I mean we stopped at the end of the at the end of June.

That was just the end of fiscal year 2026.

Uh we certainly reached a lot of markets.

And one of our best ways of measuring our effectiveness is looking at our analytics for our website.

Through the ones that you're looking at on the right-hand side, we hit all-time highs in terms of unique visitors sessions, page views.

In fact, between February and June, we hit record numbers of unique users on the website each and every one of those months.

The last two months in May and June.

We surpassed 50,000 unique users on the website, and then have even continued that into July, where we also surpassed 50,000.

We saw events soar, 783 more, or an increase of 42.7% to 2,618.

Another way to look at that is that that was seven events happening on every day, if you average those out, or uh considerable number, of course, by the week.

We do this through social media in terms of engaging uh our audience.

We had more than 27,600 followers.

We created 8.2 million impressions through the more than 900 posts that were on our social channels.

We also had some other big wins, uh I'd like to mention briefly here.

Uh one of which was the fact that the that Iowa PBS uh decided to produce a documentary on General Dodge in the Transcontinental Railroad.

Uh they came to us to see if we might be an underwriter for them last October.

We took a look at that and thought it was a great idea to promote two of our biggest attractions in Council Bluffs.

Uh fast forward to the screening.

They did a special screening on June 9th at the Hawke Family Arts and Culture Center.

Uh went over big time, uh huge thumbs up from the PACT Theater, and then fast forward just a little under a week and it debuted on Iowa PBS to a statewide audience.

Uh but it doesn't end there, it's going to be nationally distributed this October.

So this uh great man, this uh the attractions that he is linked to in the community, his home and the UP Museum are gonna definitely see some additional visitors.

We also had interstate signage finally installed four years after it became an official Iowa Welcome Center.