Christine Tarquinio: This is a great way for those that are most passionate about your community to be able to showcase their passion for it. You’re basically creating third party endorsements, right? And as a marketer, a third party endorsement is one of the strongest marketing tools you can have in your toolbox, but all different types of people are moving into your community. And so you need to reach all different types of people to support them. As they’re moving into your community, the more diverse of an audience you can have of really passionate people, the more successful your attraction efforts will be.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s the voice of Christine Tarquinio, Vice President of Talent, Workforce, and Brand Strategies at Greater Louisville, Inc. Today she tells us all about Louisville’s City Champs, local volunteers who help new talent and potential residents get to know Louisville. 

 

I’m Amanda Ellis, and you’re listening to Livability: Inside America’s Best Cities, a brand new podcast for chamber, economic development and talent attraction professionals. We bring you insights from America’s most promising places on how your community can be a better place to live, work, and play. To learn more about this podcast, visit livabilitymedia.com, where you can also sign up for Livability’s monthly Let’s Talk Talent, talent attraction newsletter. 

 

Now let’s jump in.

 

Amanda Ellis:  Christine, so awesome to have you today on Livability Podcast to tell us about Live in Lou and your City Champs city concierge type program. Thank you so much for being here today.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about City Champs.

 

Amanda Ellis: So, I would love to get an overview to start us off here. So, what are the City Champs and how does the program work?

 

Christine Tarquinio:  Well, City Champs are a collection of volunteers that are passionate about Greater Louisville. They come together for a training session and they learn how to talk about Louisville from a new resident perspective, so what is the school system look like, what do the neighborhoods look like, what types of amenities do we have here, and really just get a general education on all the amazing things that there are to do here. But what’s unique about this program is that each of them brings their own perspective and passion to the group. Every champ has a few areas that they’re especially passionate about or are experts in, and they select those as the fields that people can reach out to them about. So I’m a city champ and I have three young children. And so, one of my areas of expertise is getting kids enrolled in school. So every champ brings their own uniqueness to the program.

 

Amanda Ellis: And so, typically, they’re going to be talking with people thinking about moving to your region, right?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yes, but also people that have recently relocated, trailing spouses or partners of people that have relocated, people who are thinking about relocating.

 

Amanda Ellis: So when people connect with the City Champs, I know that on your Live in Lou website, you have them all listed and there’s a whole bunch so I was very impressed with that. I mean, how many are there? It looked like a lot.

 

Christine Tarquinio: We have over 120 and we have one more training session in the fall.

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s amazing. So lots to pick from something for everybody. How do people become City Champs? Do they have to meet any criteria? What do they have to do?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Well, you have to be passionate about Louisville and you have to live here.

 

Amanda Ellis: That would make sense.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Really, so we review everybody that applies one by one, but the people who apply are people that really love being here. You can go to our website, liveinlou.com. And then we ask a little bit of bio information so we can get to know people. They come to a training session. The sessions last a couple hours. We bring in experts from arts organizations, sports organizations, the police, the schools, the Center for Neighborhoods, really just people to come and talk about some of the unique and amazing attributes that we have here. The only thing that we do ask is a commitment from all of the champs that they will not sell their services to new residents. So as you can imagine, we get a lot of realtors that are very interested in utilizing City Champs as a way to develop their client base, but we actually ask them to sign a piece of paper that says that they’re here volunteering because they’re passionate about the region, not because they’re trying to pick up business.

 

Amanda Ellis: That makes sense. So whenever people who are thinking about moving or have moved or trailing spouses or what have you, whenever they make contact with a champ, does that normally happen through the site that you have set up or does your team ever curate the relationships, or how does that normally work?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Every way you can think of. People are able to reach out to these champs directly through the website. Each champ sets the platforms that they’re comfortable communicating with. Some are social media, some are phones, some are email, but I also get employers who call me and say, “Oh, I’m wanting to relocate so and so,” and his or her spouse, they’re not certain about it. “This is what they’re interested in. Can you pick out a city champ for me that you can put us in touch with?” I’ve had moms call me and say, “My child is moving to Louisville. Can you help me?”

 

Amanda Ellis: Oh my goodness.

 

Christine Tarquinio: I’ll ask a few questions and find a city champ that would be a good match for them. And then we also have new residents who use the City Champs program and have recruited somebody else to come here and will connect them with another city champ.

 

Amanda Ellis: Well, and I love how you’ve got a breadth of communication platforms covered, like if people prefer to text or email or message on whatever social platform, loved that, and also loved seeing what a diverse group that you have. I mean, it was all ages, all interests, families, not families, all different types of things. So that was really neat to see.

 

Christine Tarquinio: That’s very intentional. So Louisville is a certified welcoming city. And so, we had a fairness laws on the books before New York City did. And so, we really wanted to make sure that the City Champs are representative of our community and our community is a very diverse one.

 

Amanda Ellis: So, how long have you had this program going for?

 

Christine Tarquinio: It seems like forever, but really it started in 2017. We have an organization here called Leadership Louisville that does all sorts of leadership development and programming for the community. In 2017, their Bingham Fellows class, which is a class that’s comprised of leaders who volunteer to think about and solve a given community problem, in this case, it was improving town attraction efforts and one of the groups in this class came up with the idea of creating a warm welcome for new residents and dubbed it City Champs. But this is like a 10-month volunteer class and they all have full-time jobs and they were like, “Well, now what do we do? This is a really good idea.”

 

So, they reached out to us over here at Greater Louisville Inc. We are the Chamber of Commerce. They knew that we were beginning to build Live in Lou, which is our town attraction and retention initiative. So they came to us and said, “All right. Here’s our idea. Now, make it work.” And so, we collaborated with that group for about another year to figure out what’s the training going to look like, how are we going to engage champs, and basically make the idea come to life. Our first training class were our friends, people who owed us and we’re like, “Come on, you got to try this and you got to poke holes in it and we want to make it strong.” Now, we have over 120 people.

 

Amanda Ellis: So, what are some results that you’ve seen from this so far? It could be in terms of economic impact, actual moves to the city that you think might not have happened otherwise, or whatever your preferred measure is.

 

Christine Tarquinio: I mean, gosh, there’s a million different instances. Our champs probably talked to hundreds of people each year. We’ve had some people that just make direct connections. I mean, we’ve just had so many examples. I can think of one family. They were really nervous about relocating with their young child. They’d never been here. They’d never even been to the East Coast. They didn’t know what to do. Our City Champs, we connected them with City Champs to explain how to get the kids registered for school, talk about family-friendly things to do and family-friendly neighborhoods, and really helped them to de-stress about the move because they felt like they had a soft landing when they got there.

 

Amanda Ellis: That definitely makes it a lot easier, always.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yeah. Yeah. In terms of population growth, we are growing. Per the last census, we gained about 30,000 people and I think we’re projected to grow another 30 or 35,000 over the next several years. So I can’t say that City Champ’s brought all of those people here, although-

 

Amanda Ellis: But you can say they will be very busy going forward.

 

Christine Tarquinio: But I can say they will be very busy. In fact, we recently created meetups. So every other month we encourage all of the new residents that we know of and all of our City Champs to get together and meet up. I recently learned that most adults have not made a new friend in five years and that’s-

 

Amanda Ellis: That’s so sad.

 

Christine Tarquinio: I know. It’s so depressing. But if you’re a new resident someplace, that’s really daunting. And so, every other month we have meetups and we encourage our community members, our City Champs and new residents and their trailing spouses or partners to come out. In fact, we have one coming up and we’ve already got a hundred people registered.

 

Amanda Ellis: That is a sad stat about the no new friends in five years, but it’s kind of true. I think a lot of us have experienced that as you get older, it just gets harder to connect with new people. The older you get, the more commitments people have. Once you get out of college in your mid-20s, it can be hard to build a new network.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Well, and if you’re working and you have kids or you have family members that you’re taking care of, and then you add in a pandemic, that doesn’t help, it can be a little daunting.

 

Amanda Ellis: Does that family that you mentioned, what was bringing them to town, a job or something else?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yeah, the husband was being transferred and really didn’t have… Not that they didn’t want to come here, but he was like, “I don’t know anything about it. I’m told that I have to be there. And so, I don’t know what to do.” He only had two months or a month to get prepared.

 

Amanda Ellis: Have you worked with any local employers with bringing in new employees or giving them tools to talk about living in Lou from a recruitment standpoint?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yes, that’s a great question. So, I do that every day. I work with employers to discuss and assist with any talent attraction or retention, even that they have. GLI is the Metro Chamber of Commerce so we serve the business community. We go in. We listen to employer’s needs when it comes to talent attraction, but we also provide insight and even assistance.

 

One of the benefits of relocating your business to a Greater Louisville is that our team will work with you to build out customized talent attraction advertising campaigns so we can help you build the workforce that you need. But through Live in Lou, we also provide employers all of the resources that they need to sell Greater Louisville, including City Champs, who often will work with employers when they have a candidate they would like to relocate.

 

Amanda Ellis: Is that just a membership benefit? I imagine your larger employers, typically those are invested in their local chamber at a pretty high level, or is it an add-on?

 

Christine Tarquinio: No, the City Champs and the talent attraction assistance with the exception of the advertising campaigns, because they do have to pay for the media buy.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Everything is included in their investment. I mean, I’ve gone so far as to when we’ve had an employer that has had a really high value candidate who was on the fence, I’ve taken them on a driving tour around town. I’ve asked them about their kids and showed them the parks and taken them to restaurants that they like and really giving them just a full picture of how amazing it is here. Of course, we seal the deal.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. That’s a great targeted, tangible benefit for those employers and also gives you a great way to just have really good relationships with them in a way that’s beneficial on all sides. That’s awesome.

 

Christine Tarquinio: It’s definitely not something that you can do for 30,000 people because it’s just me, but-

 

Amanda Ellis: Maybe you’re just not working hard enough.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Right. Yeah. Good point.

 

Amanda Ellis: No, that would be wild. Yeah. But when you can and when you are able to do it, I mean, that’s a really special thing. I feel like it definitely would make an impression. Thinking about if that were me and the community, taking the time to invest that in one person, it really says something about it.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yeah. We’ve done that for journalists and everything before, but I found that even when my friends came to visit, I would just be taking them all over the city, trying to show them everything and convince them to move here. I was like, “Well, I could just do that with other people too.”

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a similar idea, but just a little bit different audience. So I know the City Champs are just one prong of the Live in Lou initiative. Can you talk a little more about that?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yeah, absolutely. Live in Lou is our talent attraction and retention initiative. We launched in late 2016 with idea to really showcase all the amazing things to do in Greater Louisville. I have been fortunate in my life to travel and live all over the world, but I always find myself coming back to Louisville because the people here are like none other. It’s just an incredibly welcoming community. As you can see from the engagement that we have with the City Champs, the people who live here really, really love it. Live in Lou has given us the opportunity to showcase our region. When I started about four and a half years ago, we had a couple hundred social media followers. Last month we crossed over to 50,000.

 

Amanda Ellis: Wow.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yeah, it’s been incredible growth, but it just shows you that the bulk of those people that are engaging with us are people who live here or who come back to visit us all the time. So there’s a lot of love for Louisville.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. What are some of the different amenities or special things about Louisville that you’re usually touting as far as why people would want to come?

 

Christine Tarquinio: How much time do we have?

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah.

 

Christine Tarquinio: 50,000 feet, to sum it up, we have it all and there’s no traffic to do it.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, it’s always a great selling point.

 

Christine Tarquinio: We have an incredible food scene. I mentioned earlier that we’re a certified welcoming city and we have a very large immigrant population. So we have every single kind of food that you can imagine, from farm to table to Ethiopian, to Vietnamese, to everything. It really just creates this beautiful melting pot here. If you like bourbon, we have that too. In fact, we have more barrels of bourbon than we do people.

 

Amanda Ellis: Is that a real stat or –

 

Christine Tarquinio: It is. It really is.

 

Amanda Ellis: Okay.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Although to be fair, in the pandemic, we may have depleted some of the bourbon, so I don’t know.

 

Amanda Ellis: For hand sanitizer or dealing with the pandemic in other ways or both?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Oh, definitely not hand sanitizer.

 

Amanda Ellis: Well, I know we had a group in Chattanooga, like a distillery that diverted some of their alcohol supply for-

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yeah. We have Moonshine U here did that as well. I went and got a bottle because I was like, “When am I ever going to be able to get a bottle of hand sanitizer from a bourbon maker?”

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. You’re like, “This is probably my moment for that.” That’s awesome.

 

Christine Tarquinio: We also really have a burgeoning and incredible craft beer scene. We’re very big on local here, as I’m sure lots of other communities are, but we wear local like a badge of honor. We work very hard to support our independent businesses here. We have a ton of arts organizations. If you like the arts, we have everything. We have opera, ballet, orchestra, theater, youth organizations, museums. I mean, you could find something different to do in the arts 365 days a year. For me, I’m a sports person, so football, basketball, soccer, horse racing. I mean, we do it all here. We actually just got a national women’s soccer team to come to Louisville called Racing Louisville FC. There’s just a million of things to do here. I could take up another hour talking about how great it is.

 

Amanda Ellis: Definitely sounds like a little bit of everything and something for everyone, which has been the theme of this conversation, I feel like, especially with all of your City Champs and how they also have something for everyone. Would you recommend a program like this for other cities? I mean, it sounds like it’s been really successful for you all and you’ve had really good engagement locally. So, would you recommend it and any suggestions for other communities who might be thinking about doing something like this?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Absolutely. This is a great way for those that are most passionate about your community to be able to showcase their passion for it. You’re basically creating third-party endorsements, right? As a marketer, a third-party endorsement is one of the strongest marketing tools you can have in your toolbox. But all different types of people are moving into your community and so you need to reach all different types of people to support them as they’re moving into your community. The more diverse of an audience you can have of really passionate people, the more successful your attraction efforts will be. We did some research a few years back and surveyed about 900 people that had relocated to Louisville who were thinking about relocating. We asked them, “If you relocated and left, why did that happen?” They said because they didn’t feel like they fit. They didn’t feel like they fit in. City Champs are a great way to be able to help people feel like they fit in, but don’t call it City Champs because we’re trademarking it.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. One more logistics question about how it works. I believe with their profiles on the live and lose site, it says how they are open to being contacted and just includes their contact info. So, is that typically how the contact happens, like they’ll just get a message from however they’ve indicated that they’re open?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yep. Yep. For the most part. I mean, I do get calls from employers or from friends that are trying to relocate another friend saying, “I need someone specific.” We had startup competition here last year and the winners of it had to agree to relocate their startup here. And so, the person running that organization came to me and said, “I want to make sure that they’re happy when they’re here. I need six City Champs that have different interests like this.” In those instances, I’ll make one-on-one connections, call up the champ, explain the situation, ask them for their engagement and assistance if they’re available. We also give all of the champs the option to pause because life happens. Sometimes you just can’t dedicate as much time to volunteerism as you would like to. So we can pause them if we need to. But for the most part, the champs get contacted directly through how they’ve selected on the website.

 

Amanda Ellis: It’s also a great way for them to build more community. I mean, I know that we’ve really kept the focus on the people who are new to the area, but it’s also good for the champs to meet new people and continue building their networks.

 

Christine Tarquinio: It absolutely is. I mean, when we get all of the champs and the new residents together, it’s an electric environment. Everybody is so happy, happy to be around each other. Of course, a lot of that is everybody is happy to be back out around people.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah.

 

Christine Tarquinio: But the people that decide to become City Champs are people who want to connect with other people. They want to make sure that you’re happy here, and so that already self-qualifies what that experience is going to be like.

 

Amanda Ellis: How long have you been based in Louisville? It sounds like you might have roots there.

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yep, I’m from Louisville, but I have traveled all over the world, but I always come back. Now, I’m stuck here because I have a bunch of kids.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah, three little ones and sounds like that probably keeps you quite busy. So as we head towards wrapping up here, my final question for our guests is always a fun question and that is what is one bucket list item that anyone who visits your city should be sure to do?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Gosh. All right. It’s got to be the Derby. You got to go to the Derby.

 

Amanda Ellis: Good answer.

 

Christine Tarquinio: The Kentucky Derby is an experience that is like none other. Regrettably, it’s a little bit expensive, but you just cannot imagine what it’s like to see everybody turned out in their finest, spend a beautiful day at the racetrack, cash a few tickets, have a bourbon or two, possibly pass a celebrity and really just have fun.

 

Amanda Ellis: Ladies still wear all the fancy hats, is that a real thing?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Yes, of course.

 

Amanda Ellis: I’ve never really done anything Derby related. So, do you?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Of course.

 

Amanda Ellis: Do you have Derby hats?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Of course. I’m a proper Southern woman. Are you kidding me?

 

Amanda Ellis: What is your favorite one look like?

 

Christine Tarquinio: So, I tend to get very hot when I wear a hat so I have fascinators mostly, but I love big, giant, obnoxious fascinators.

 

Amanda Ellis: Well, when in Rome, right? Or when in Louisville, I should say.

 

Christine Tarquinio: You just have to be careful. You can’t kiss on the cheek very well with them because you end up poking each other in the eye.

 

Amanda Ellis: Yeah. You might want to watch out. That might not make for such a fun day. Well, thank you so much, Christine, for some really great insights. Anything else you’d like to add to our conversation about Louisville or the champs or anything else?

 

Christine Tarquinio: Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t encourage everybody to come and visit us in Louisville. You can see what it’s like to live, work and play here if you go to liveinlou.com.

 

Amanda Ellis: Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Christine. Really enjoyed our conversation today.

 

Christine Tarquinio: All right. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about Louisville and City Champs.

 

Amanda Ellis: Thanks for listening to the Livability podcast where we take you inside America’s best cities. At Livability, we highlight the unsung awesomeness of small and mid-size cities across the country. We also partner with communities to reach their target companies and potential residents through digital content and print magazine programs. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate and review this show wherever you listen to podcasts. You can learn more about us at livabilitymedia.com. 

 

Have an idea for an upcoming episode, email me at [email protected]. Until next time, from Livability, I’m Amanda Ellis sharing the stories of America’s most promising places.