Down the Black Hole

A month has passed since Goodwood Road got a mention on "South Aussie With Cosi" and I guess you're all raking in the extra cash. No? Neither am I. Nor have I benefited from the feature in the pretentious CityMag online shopping directory.* And not one customer has burst in the door saying how irresistible is their urge to shop after seeing the decorated Primary School Fence. Which prompts me to ask; how much of our money was spent on these promotions, and why hasn't anyone noticed that it's vanished down a black hole?

The GRBA's Annual Report and Financial Statement for last year are out, but they are less than transparent on this subject. They speak mysteriously of "Digital Economy Strategy" and "Streetscape Activation". Would someone please tell me plainly:

• How much was spent on the article in CityMag that did not mention my business once, not even in small print? *
• How much did the gig on "South Aussie With Cosi" set us back?
• How much was spent on decorating the Primary School Fence ?
• Why was anything at all spent on decorating the Primary School Fence?
• How much was lost on the flopped "Goodwood Groove"?
• What was the $13,000+ "Advertising" money actually spent on? 
• Did anyone test whether any of these outlays actually brought us customers?
• Does anyone care? 

One thing was clear in the financial report - administration costs were 44% of income. 44% of income! !!!!!!!!. (That's a whole sentence of exclamation marks.) How can this phony business association possibly be a good idea when nearly half its income goes on admin! If you're smarter than me and you can make any of this seem rational, please explain it in the comments below.

*citymag.indaily.com.au/?s=Goodwood/ 

Getting The Most of The Pie

There have been rumbles of discontent in the Precinct. I've heard angry whispers. Tears have been shed. The story I've heard is that particular businesses have been receiving favourable treatment.

When I hear stories like this, it is not my habit to swallow them whole. I like to check the facts, see if there is any substance.

So I did a quick survey of the GRBA's "Goodwood Road" Facebook page http://facebook.com/GoodwoodAlive/ to see if anyone was getting more than their fair share of promotion. The GRBA's Co-ordinator posts on the page several times a week. To get an idea whether certain businesses were in fact getting disproportionate exposure, I looked at 40 consecutive posts. 

 34 businesses were mentioned. There are around 80 businesses in the Precinct: 21 were mentioned only once, 13 were mentioned more than once, while around 46 were not mentioned at all. Of those mentioned more than once, 8 were mentioned twice, while a lucky handful were mentioned multiple times. These were: The Capri Theatre (6 mentions), Two Sisters Food and Wine Bar (5 mentions), The Boulangerie (4 mentions), Trouble and Strife (4 mentions) and The Community Centre (not a business) (4 mentions).

Let's call these fortunate establishments the Top Five. They got 38% of the 60 business mentions. Not exactly even-handed.

"Others" includes 29 businesses mentioned either once or twice. So 15% of the businesses got 38% of the mentions.

It gets even more disproportionate when you look at how often the Top Five were the sole subject of a post. (Some posts mention more than one business, others feature one business only. These figures are about the latter.) The Boulangerie (3 sole mentions), The Capri Theatre (4 sole mentions), Two Sisters Food and Wine Bar, (1 sole mention), Trouble and Strife (2 sole mentions).

Of the posts mentioning one business only, 45% were of the Top Five, amply supporting the rumours of favourable treatment.

There were 22 sole mentions: 10 of these were about the Top 5.

Other biases in evidence: 57% of mentions were cafes/restaurants/eateries and regrettably you were far more likely to get a mention if you were of white anglo extraction rather than Asian. Only one Asian eatery got a sole mention. An astonishing nine were lumped together in one post. 

I was sad to discover that, in this sample at least, people's suspicions were true. The businesses they suspected of getting favourable treatment are indeed getting it. I'm not saying it's intentional. It may be quite unintentional. But it's happening. And it isn't fair.



 

The School Fence as Promotional Opportunity

$50,000 a year should be enough to do a couple of worthwhile things to promote Goodwood Road as a destination. Maybe an ad on the back of a bus. A brochure to go in hotel lobbies. Maybe light up the street trees with fairy lights. Even in better economic times, few businesses in the so-called Goodwood Road Precinct could survive on local patronage alone, so any worthwhile promotion would aim to draw people here from all of greater Adelaide. Plus, we're on the doorstep of the CBD, which at certain times is awash with interstate visitors. Surely $50,000 could be fruitfully spent to draw people here? You would think so. And it might be if it were not for this one handicap built into the GRBA*. It is required to "involve the community"! No kidding. It says that in the GRBA Constitution, the one that was written by Unley Council.

Now I for one would love to involve the community in my business: I would like them to be my customers, and I'm happy to involve people from all over Adelaide in that role, not just Goodwood people. I am not, however, a person trained in community development. That's not what I do. I'm a bookseller. Further, I do not want my hard-earned rates handed over to a gang of well-meaning but unskilled volunteers so they can spend it, at will, on whatever they think might be business-promotiony-cum-community-developmenty things. They are retailers. They are restaurateurs. They are bakers. They are hairdressers. They are not community development experts.

Maybe Council have more sense than I'm crediting them with. Maybe they never intended  GRBA to give more than a passing glance toward "involving the community". If so, then someone should tell the GRBA, because marrying the interests of community development and business promotion together is a difficult task and there have to be better things they can do with the money than decorating a school fence. You'd be hard pressed to convince me that was doing anything to advance the interests of my business. Anything at all. Ever.


*Goodwood Road Business Association