City of Sioux Center and Sioux Center Chamber Get $10,000 Grant for Video Campaign
Story courtesy Sioux City Journal, by Mason Dockter.
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — The Sioux Center Chamber of Commerce and the City of Sioux Center have received a $10,000 grant from the Iowa Tourism Office to continue a video campaign promoting the Sioux County community.
Barb Den Herder, CEO of the Sioux Center Chamber, said the Chamber and the city partnered in 2020 and 2021 to produce video reels of Sioux Center “to attract people to our community to visit here, to live here, to work here.”
This year’s videos will be used for social media promotions and television spots, Den Herder said. The previous years’ videos — featuring slick aerial footage of Sioux Center and video of concerts, golfing, skateboarding, soccer, public parks, swimming, dog-walking, bicycling, sports, education and industry in the community — reached more than 100,000 people, she added. The stars of the videos are members of the Sioux Center community.
“We had a great reach with that,” Den Herder said.
Sioux Center is a “growth-minded community,” said Sioux Center Communications Coordinator Maggie Landegent. “We’re really good at pursuing the next big thing to help grow the community. We’re not always thinking about how exciting our story is. So this is an opportunity to share that story.”
The community has a lot going for it. Its industries are robust, its population grew by nearly 17 percent between the 2010 census and 2020 and its median household income — $80,955 — is quite strong, more than $10,000 above the national average and more than $21,000 higher than that of Sioux City.
“We’re looking to do a better job of telling those stories to people,” Landegent said. “To showcase some of the great amenities and lifestyle and opportunities for people here in Sioux Center.”
“Sioux Center is an awesome story for Iowa,” she added. “It’s a story about a place you can live a really full life and have a family, great friends, and safety, and a great community, but also have a lot of opportunities available.”
Plans call for filming of the new videos to take place over a single day in June, Den Herder said; the footage will be parlayed into “a lot of different pieces that we can use on different social media platforms.”
The Sioux Falls advertising and marketing firm of Mud Mile Communications is in charge of filming and editing.
The videos will be shot in a vertical aspect ratio, rather than the usual horizontal, which enables the video to display more fully on a smartphone screen.
“We wanted to more vertical shots so we can use them on other media platforms,” Den Herder said.
The goal of the campaign is “multi-faceted,” Den Herder said. “If we can get people to visit our community, whether that’s to experience the rich golf course, or the Siouxnami Waterpark, or play hockey — we know that the more that people come to our community, then they may choose to live here too. And then, ultimately, that helps our workforce.”
The campaign’s slogan — “Live Life in the Middle of Everything” — came from a focus-group of Sioux Center residents, Landegent said.
“We kept coming back to this idea of, having big-city amenities and opportunities, with also small-town community feel and safety,” she said. “And so we talked about how that’s kind of in the middle — you know, in the middle of big-city and small-town. And also, in the middle of America, right?”
“We feel like we have a little bit of everything here,” Den Herder said. “We have great amenities. Our trail program is good, our education system is good, our healthcare is good. And we’re kind of in the middle of the nation.”