Client Story: Destination Rapid City

Including The Sculpture Project, Main Street Square, and Downtown Rapid City

We believe art plays an important role in communities. It creates questions. Inspires curiosity. Imagines possibility. 

As Destination Rapid City, a nonprofit organization in South Dakota supporting downtown businesses, cultural institutions and events, prepared to launch the largest privately funded public art project in the country at Main Street Square, they turned to Numad to develop a website and social media strategy to promote the initiative within their own community while also positioning the organization as a creative thought-leader for public art in the nation.

They also came to Numad with a challenge: to strategize, develop, design and launch the new website and content management system in a 45-day timeframe in anticipation of an important milestone in the project—the announcement of the selected artist to carve the 21 granite sculptures downtown after an international search.

Working with both the organization and the artist, Numad developed a site that:

• Celebrates the role public art plays in vibrant communities; 

• Positions the public art project in Rapid City, South Dakota, as a model for other communities to learn from and aspire to—strengthening the benefits of art as a tool for economic and cultural sustainability in communities;

• Keeps the immediate region informed about the progress of the project, and engages the community in dialogue to make this a project that values and integrates collaborations with citizens across the Black Hills; 

• Supports internal staff as they partner with private donors and foundations to expand educational and outreach programs for both the public art project, but also for art and culture initiatives across the region; and, 

• Streamlines the web updating process, creating efficiencies in staff time through the introduction of an intuitive content management system.

With the launch of the new website, Destination Rapid City expanded the partnership to include a 12-month social media and e-communication program that continues to target and expand the vision of the public art project to specific audiences: the immediate Black Hills community, tourists traveling to the region to visit Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial, and arts organizations across the country. Within the first two months of implementation, the social media program has:

• Increased followers on Facebook by 112 percent; 

• Increased the number of people targeted with specific messaging about The Sculpture Project by 135 percent; 

• Increased the number of people dialoguing about The Sculpture Project by 135 percent; and, 

• Reached a total of 29,199 people with messaging about The Sculpture Project, an increase of 10,877 percent.

These numbers have grown even more today.

The organization is also seeing the benefits of data-rich analytics that are reinforcing past decisions and informing new strategies as they continue to cultivate relationships.

Downtown rapid city and main street square

Destination Rapid City continued their partnership with Numad, bringing the firm on board to redesign their two other websites—for Main Street Square and for Downtown Rapid City—as well as develop e-marketing technologies and strategies. Our work continues with them today, offering consulting and technology support for their online initiatives.