Visit St. Pete Clearwater staff summarized results from the organization’s 7/27 resident-appreciation program, which this year expanded to a weekend and used a mobile passport to track business redemptions and resident engagement.

"We got 85,000 mobile passport sign ups" (correction: 8,500) — Jessica Morrow, marketing project manager at Visit St. Pete Clearwater, reported that the Bandwango-powered passport produced 8,505 sign-ups and 4,815 total deal redemptions across 137 participating businesses (staff supplied rounding and campaign detail during the meeting). Morrow said each of the 137 participating businesses received at least one redemption and that the passport redemption mechanics included both in-person and online deals. The passport also generated roughly 1,086 t-shirt redemptions and 458 art-print redemptions that were fulfilled through passport claims and activation visits.

Staff ran two public activations — at the Clearwater Threshers baseball game and at the St. Pete Pier — and reported approximately 7,064 in-person engagements associated with those activations. Marketing and partner promotions produced over 17 million paid-impression placements locally; social platforms recorded more than one million views and nearly 550,000 reach during the weekend. Public relations work generated 54 earned-media mentions and an estimated 57 million impressions, staff said.

Morrow said the event also collected local business recommendations via an Allegiant/PIE voucher prize entry; about 100 prize entries had been recorded at the time of the briefing. Staff said they plan to reuse the mobile-passport list for future localized offers and thanked participating businesses and volunteers for help executing the program.

Ending: Staff said they intend to repeat and build on the program next year and emphasized the passport’s value as a way to quantify resident engagement with tourism businesses.