ACT MTMPP Grant Report | Final | July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025
February 2025, and the Maine Governor’ s Conference on Tourism in April of 2025.
Tourism is“ front of mind” for municipalities and businesses now, more than ever! Increased community awareness was a 2024 / 25 goal set by the ACT Board and tremendous progress was made to increase participation, engagement, and representation of Aroostook in statewide meetings, forums, and gatherings. ACT now refers to stakeholders as ACT Partners to better align with MOT work. Visitaroostook. com has a new section of the website called ACT Partners Hub. Here, ACT Partners may login to create business, special offer, and event listings while also navigating to self-serve tools, opportunities, and resources such as visitation data sets, in-region meetings and workshops, and the ACT marketing plan. This increased web presence maintains ACT as a leader in the region for tourism development and collaboration. There has been an increased presence by MTA, MOT, Hospitality Maine, MSA, and ATV Maine in the region and it has stimulated great conversations and programming.
ACT doubled the ACT Partners email list to move high-quality industry information out to organizations and businesses in the region on a regular basis. ACT staff and board members are proactively networking continuously and sharing speaking engagements, presentations, and actively engaged in the communities of northern Maine. More work needs to be done on the ACT Partners Hub of visitaroostook. com to make more programs, tools, and opportunities available in a self-serve format for Aroostook stakeholders. ACT’ s goal in completing this tool is for businesses to realize ACT, MOT, and MTA tools are available to them to grow and thrive.
• ACT Partners email list has 2,322 subscribers. Six emails were sent in this period with an average open rate of 59 %
• Coffee and Tourism- round table forums o Houlton – February 17 th, 26 attendees at the Houlton Coop and Farm Store in partnership with MTA and Greater Houlton Chamber of Commerce o Caribou – January 15 th, 29 attendees at Best Western Caribou Inn in partnership with
MTA o Madawaska – June 4 th, 34 attendees at Four Seasons Trail Association in partnership with the St. John Chamber of Commerce and MTA.
• Wednesday Ski Report and Thursday Snowmobile Trail Report have a new place on visitaroostook. com. Done each week in season. Creating these reports requires weekly outreach to operators in Aroostook. o www. visitaroostook. com / post / ski-report o www. visitaroostook. com / post / snowmobile-trail-report
• Aroostook County Board of Directors Meetings were held seven in this period, and all are welcome to join on the last Wednesday of each month from 10-11:00 AM. The date and length of meetings have been shortened to increase board quorum at meetings.
• # VisitAroostook campaign deployed in-region to spark user-generated content at 30 ACT Partner locations.
• Best of Aroostook Awards were awarded to 9 businesses and organizations. Awards were given at a brief ceremony during the Madawaska Coffee and Tourism event.
• Aroostook County Tourism Summit o May 1 st full-day summit.
• www. nmdc. org / event / aroostook-county-tourism-summit