Archive News from Digital Main Street

Mount Pleasant BIA's Bread and Butter Restaurant, Dew Haus, Positano, Mason's Fine Foods, Bolan Thai, and The Flaky Tart have all banded together to offer up meals to the frontline healthcare workers.

The digital environment offers small businesses a seemingly unending string of places to be – there’s e-commerce and social media, Google’s business listings and review aggregators like Yelp. But there’s something to be said for not getting lost in it all and instead focusing on doing a few channels right.

For Lisa Kuypers-Schroedter bringing Digital Main Street to Trenton’s Downtown BIA seemed like an easy sell. The program aims to help main street businesses strengthen their online capabilities. After hearing about it and sitting in on a few talks, she figured it was time to export the concept to Trenton and neighbouring Brighton.

Tucked in the elbow of the Rideau Canal, Ottawa’s the Glebe neighbourhood is a unique enclave. It boasts a historic butcher, baker and candlestick maker style main street alongside a world class entertainment complex and urban park. It’s that diversity that keeps the business community there tight, a neighbourhood set within Canada’s capital city.

Bailey Regier, the DSS Team Lead, says the BIA had already pulled together an inventory on where businesses were at in terms of digital literacy before she started going out to the community. There was a sense amongst many that having a digital presence was a necessary evil. But Regier has made it her goal to shift the mindset from “digital being a necessary evil to an opportunity.”  It’s still early, admits Carradine-Armstrong but she’s confident in a community she watched rebuild itself. “We’re able to adapt.” 

“One of the most important challenges facing small business in the Town of Oakville is their ability to embrace the digital age. It’s vital for business today to adapt and become familiar with digital technology,” said Stephen Crawford, MPP for Oakville.

Next year, Midland’s King Street, one of the town’s key arteries will undergo a massive redesign, disrupting the flow of the downtown core and the businesses that drive the local economy. It’s a big change for the community, one the Downtown Midland Business Improvement Area has been hoping to offset by fixing up the alleyways, putting in more signage, and improving facades in the back.  

It was Janel Gagnier, coordinator of the Belle River On The Lake BIA, that first convinced the board to take up the Digital Main Street initiative. “Right away I knew it was a good thing and I knew it would benefit the businesses in our community,” says Gagnier. She admits she came down hard, telling her board: “We don't want to think about it, we don’t want to talk about it, we want to do it now… they all agreed and we applied.” 

By zeroing in on individual business owner’s digital needs, the Peterborough Digital Main Street squad has managed to enlist 51 of the downtown core’s businesses into the program so far.