CLEARFIELD – The board of Clearfield County Recreation and Tourism Authority discussed some marketing items and other matters Wednesday.
Director Josiah Jones talked about Visit Clearfield County’s experience with Visit PA. He said some things have worked well and others have not.
One problem was that VCC was not getting many leads from the Web site and recently learned that the e-mail from Visit PA, which was supposed to list all of the leads, only listed a small number. To find the rest, the staff needs to utilize their dashboard on the Web site.
Jones said last year VCC paid for a half-page advertisement in Visit PA’s travel guide and suggested this year they could do a full page ad and highlight five partners, sharing the cost with the partners.
Additionally, he suggested the tourism authority pay for 10 listings. The total cost would be $10,800 for the ad and the listings, and a portion of that, about $500 each, would be shared by the partners who are highlighted in the printed ad.
The board approved the plan. About 200,000 copies of the travel guide are published each year.
VCC will no longer utilize the banner ads on Visit PA’s Web site. Jones learned that the person in charge of setting those up chose to remove VCC’s ad both in 2017 and 2018 for no reason.
Additionally, there are nearly 200 banner ads set to rotate on the Web site and because of the number, few people see all of them.
In other matters, Jones said the High Country Arts and Crafts Festival at S.B. Elliot State Park was extremely well attended and members of the Clearfield Elks club said it may be the best attended one in the 30-year history of the festival. Jones met people from several states as well as from around Pennsylvania.
Jones also reported that the geocache trail, featured on geocaching.com, has been a huge success with people from around the country and even from England traveling to the area to do the trail, which has 135 caches.
The people at geocaching.com told Jones that Clearfield County’s trail is one of the biggest in the nation and is out-performing most of those listed on the site.
