A new effort to promote tourism in the near west suburbs is taking shape.
Last week, the Visit Oak Park tourism office announced that it had changed its name to Explore Oak Park and Beyond in an effort to more clearly support the organization’s work promoting tourism across the 19 communities it serves. The organization also debuted a new tag line — “Do West of Chicago” — at its annual meeting on Tuesday, May 6.
The name the group settled on for the rebrand was also chosen to make it more friendly to online search engines, as the group has tried to build up a larger digital presence to promote events and businesses in the area.
The change was “20 years in the making,” the group’s director Annie Coakley said at the annual meeting held at the Cheney Mansion.
Above all, the rebrand speaks to an emphasis on cross-community collaboration, as the agency hopes to help establish more of an identity for the area between Chicago’s western border and Interstate 294. A region united by public transportation lines, cuisine and values, the area has more to gain by uplifting every community, Coakley said.
“This gives us the potential to build a region with story, we are just due west of Chicago but we have so much to do in the area,” Coakley said. “Let’s work together, keep it boundaryless and let’s be a super strong region.”
The rebrand comes with a new logo for Explore Oak Park and Beyond, designed to be evocative of a vintage neon sign that you might find outside a local hot dog stand. The logo will swap out “Oak Park” for the name of any of the other communities in materials promoting events and businesses in other villages.
It also signifies a refreshed effort looking to attract four types of visitors — history buffs, regional food connoisseurs, nature seekers and families on day trips.
“Everything we do is based on data, so we do a lot of research on who is paying attention to our sites and to our social media,” Coakley said.
Explore Oak Park and Beyond will soon publish new visitor itineraries that will guide visitors to businesses and attractions across village lines.
Several local leaders spoke to the importance of that goal during a roundtable discussion at the meeting.
“This branding is important to me, it’s personal,” Broadview Mayor Katrina Thompson. “There are no boundaries for who we are as a community.”
“We are talented, and we want to share.”
Forest Park Village Administrator Rachell Entler said that communities in the
region can maintain their individual identities.
“We are no longer these little communities, we are now one giant community,” she said. “We all have our unique identities, but those boundaries are blurring in a good way. We’re partners with each other as opposed to competitors with one another. That’s where I see this going.”
Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman said the collaboration speaks to a stronger spirit of collaboration between the communities than she’s seen before.
“We are more powerful in partnership,” she said. “It is a new era.”
The organization’s goal of growing tourism in the region is supported by funding from both local governments and the state of Illinois. Oak Park supports its Wright- and Hemingway-centric local tourism efforts, largely through a local tax on hotels and other overnight accommodations.