In late 2024, Calumet County received a grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) to develop a website and an initiative aimed at workforce talent attraction and retention. Situated near the middle of the state on the eastern shore of Wisconsin’s largest inland lake, the county features rolling farms and beautiful vistas. Outdoor activities are many, in addition to great schools, healthcare, and community pride. They also offer a wide variety of job opportunities in engineering, manufacturing, production, healthcare, education, and more. The county itself has a relatively small population of just 54,000. Although larger cities such as Green Bay, Manitowoc, Sheboygan and Fond du Lac are nearby, the grant required that the county’s efforts only be focused on attracting people from out of state.
In addition to raising awareness of job opportunities for those outside state lines, one of the biggest challenges of this effort was time. We received the Request for Proposal (RFP) in January 2025, but, according to the grant stipulations, all funds had to be expended by May 31, 2025. That meant not only did we need to develop a winning strategy, and plan a website quickly, we would also have just four months to produce and launch everything.
Collaborating with our client, we quickly arranged meetings and facilitated surveys with stakeholders so we would be armed with just the right information and insights. It was also fortunate that they had a robust visitor-attraction entity, Travel Calumet. Over the years, they had created several successful campaigns differentiating their destination, and in addition to a solid graphic identity, they also had a large photo and video library. Utilizing these assets, we were able to quickly develop a web presence that was not only emotionally engaging but aesthetically pleasing. The Select Calumet brand was purposefully created to be very similar to that of Travel Calumet. In our experience creating talent attraction campaigns, we found that the reasons why people choose to visit a place are very similar to the reasons why they’d choose to move there. It’s a Live, Work, Play… or in this instance a Live, Work, Dream message that, when done well, connects to audiences and spurs on action.
Going from zero to a fully launched website in just four months is no small feat. But through hard work and building partnerships between the agency, clients and stakeholders, we were able to get the job done. The one thing we were lacking was content specifically addressing the current state of employment in the county. Although Travel Calumet provided us access to beautiful footage of the place, they didn’t have much in the way of people, and certainly had no profiles of businesses. In addition to the website, we produced a series of videos featuring employers and employees from a wide variety of businesses from across the county. In addition, we also captured the thoughts of community leaders and residents to round out the appeal of this place… People telling personal stories to other people about why they should come to Calumet County to Live, Work and Dream.
“We worked with McDaniels Marketing on a new talent attraction program for Calumet County that included branding, market research, designing and launching a new talent attraction website, shooting B-roll and creating a new video for the website. The team at McDaniels was great to work with, communicated well, responded to all our needs, and hit all of the deadlines we needed to meet.”
– Jason Pausma, Economic Development Director, Calumet County, WI
