Benchmarking is not a new concept. Businesses have been using it for years. So have economic development organizations.
If you want to know how you stack up against your competition -- or, better yet, how to improve your organization’s performance -- what better way to do it than to measure your strong (and weak) points against their strong (and weak) points?
In the process of benchmarking, you are also able to discover weak points in your product or presentation that you, heretofore, may not have realized were weak points. After all, strength and weakness are both relative terms that have meaning only when compared to the competition.
When you chose communities for bench marking, you normally choose E.D. organizations with whom you normally compete, as well as communities that are “a notch above” yours.
All in all, it’s a great way to measure how you’re doing, as well as a great source for new ideas that can help you improve your community’s economic development program. For communities with an active, vibrant business expansion and retention program, benchmarking is an invaluable tool.
Unfortunately, after the last few years of booming economy and low unemployment, not too many communities have maintained an “active and vibrant” business expansion and retention program. True, few have totally abolished their economic development programs, but most seem to have cut back dramatically on their E.D. efforts and resources.
The typical response from local board members from your occasional appeals for more money to invest in attraction and retention has been: “Why bother? Unemployment is already so low that we don’t have enough workers, anyway.” In fact, many economic developers themselves felt that way. It’s a tough argument to refute.
Now, the problem is to convince your board members that times are changing, and that your community had better get back to attraction and retention before things get a whole lot worse. Yet it’s hard to convince someone that doing nothing (and saving money in the process) is a bad thing. How do you convince them?
One way might be the reverse of conventional benchmarking.
Find one or two communities that shared your basic economic and social demographics about 10 years ago, but with a slight twist – pick only communities that have gone down hill over the last decade. This information should be fairly easy to get, especially now that the 2000 Census information is beginning to stream out.
The idea is kind of an offshoot of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” in that you show your board members (or political leadership) what can happen to a community like yours when businesses, as well as workers, decide to abandon ship. Just as towns grow into cities, and cities into major metro areas, they also go the other way.
Towns (and cities) can also shrivel up and die. It’s happened throughout history, and it’s happening now.
There’s nothing like the sight of a town, or city, just like yours that has fallen upon bad times and whose future is now in serious doubt, to really drive home the importance of an active business expansion and retention program.
Just as in conventional benchmarking, where you mostly learn from the successes of others, “reverse benchmarking” enables you to learn primarily from the failures of others. The real scary part is that your community may be doing many of the very same things that your dying counterpart community was/is doing.
And once you’ve identified a few of these communities and have done the data research, schedule an on-site visit to the community for a few of your key board members, or local political leaders. There’s nothing like actually seeing it up close and personal to really drive home the consequences of continued inaction.
The great attraction for most of us to economic development is that it is future-oriented. When you peel away all of the bureaucracy and paperwork, it’s really about ensuring the future growth of your community, about providing good jobs for the next generation so that, rather than moving on, they’ll stay to work and raise a family in their hometowns. It’s about living the American Dream.
Sometimes you have to show folks the downside to remind them how important an active and vibrant economic development program is.
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