Lee on marketing contract savings and in-house staffing

Really quickly, just going into some of the savings, because I know that in FY27's executive plan, it included savings of about $2.1 million over the next four years.

And this is largely, I think, from the termination of a marketing contract in favor of doing the work in-house versus external.

And so a lot of the marketing contract, I believe, was focused on business attraction and development through programs such as REAP, which is Relocation and Employment Assistance, and RACE, which is the

Relocation Assistance Credit for Employees.

And these businesses, you know, the programs can help attract businesses and employees through the relocation incentives.

And so just wanted to know.

Who was it contracted with and if in-house are you hiring additional staff to do that and why did EDC determine that the marketing work could be done in-house versus externally?

Yeah, thanks for that question.

I think, you know, we have a whole marketing team and external affairs team as well as a business development team.

And so I think we thought that the expertise from the marketing contract.

that we had, we sort of understood what we needed to do and we could bring it in-house.

We also have like a lot of, as everyone is relying more on social media, so there's a lot of activity related to LinkedIn especially and other avenues to get the word out there.

But in terms of those specific incentives, we have very targeted outreach through our biz dev team.

For companies that have shown interest or companies that we have partnerships with these generators that generate interest in bringing businesses to New York City.

Okay, so I'm assuming most of that is going to be towards staffing.

Is any ad buys included?

Say it again.

Most of it's probably going to staffing, I'm assuming.

And are there any ad buys?

And also, I'm assuming multiple languages, hopefully, because we know our businesses in New York are very diverse in terms of the languages spoken.

Yeah, a lot of it's going in-house.

We do still have a marketing budget, and we do buy specific ads through LinkedIn or paid LinkedIn posts, I guess, to reach a larger audience.

And I think specifically, I'll have to get back to you about the multiple languages.

But we appreciate that.

I think that's a great idea.

Okay.

No, only because just from my former work in the nonprofit sector, the language is very important and key.

And I know that there's a lot of, you know, for example, even local media.

that a lot of folks pay attention to and may spread the word through their friends and family networks that way to say, hey, there's this program out there.

So just wanted to put that out there.

Yeah, that's great.

Thank you.