What words come to mind when you think about Bowen Island?
Survey says: it’s all about community.
Bowen’s Branding Working Group presented a survey of local residents to municipal council’s committee of the whole at its meeting last Tuesday (Dec. 15) as part of its ongoing branding initiative.
The online survey of residents aged 15 years and older was conducted from Oct. 1 to Nov. 2 and was communicated through the Undercurrent, social media, personal invitations and canvassing of ferry lineups. Overall 339 residents started the survey, 214 provided useful stories and 197 completed the entire survey.
“The vast majority of the stories were positive and rich in imagery and emotion,” the report says. “They were very insightful.”
The survey was designed to discover insights about residents, the most memorable experiences they have had on Bowen and the emotional benefits they receive from living here, according to the report. It follows a similar survey of visitors conducted in 2014 and will be followed by a survey of local businesses to be released in February.
The survey respondents skewed female (70 per cent) but the report saw no substantive differences in answer based on gender. Respondent were also mainly older, with 81 per cent of respondents aged 45 or older and only 3 per cent aged 34 or younger. Nearly 90 per cent of respondents were full-time residents.
The survey consisted of five open-ended questions:
• What three words come to mind when you think of Bowen Island?
• Tell us about your most memorable experience on Bowen.
• How did that experience make you feel?
• Imagine you are writing a personal story about Bowen Island. What would be the title of your story?
• What makes Bowen Island unique?
The survey presented the most common words used in the replies as word clouds. “Community” showed up repeatedly as the most common word used when residents were asked what words came to mind when they thought about Bowen, when describing their most memorable experiences and how it made them feel, and what makes Bowen unique.
“Home” and “paradise” were the most common words to show up when residents were asked the title of their personal story about Bowen Island.
The survey indicates that residents appreciate Bowen’s proximity to the city, its natural beauty, its quiet and peaceful nature, its arts and culture scene, its small, rural and safe character and even its ferry service.
Working from that and the stories submitted by residents, the working group came up with seven themes to describe what it calls “the emotional heart” of living on Bowen. Those themes, using residents’ own words, are:
• “Magic of everyday: The simple but incredibly fulfilling pleasures of everyday life on Bowen”;
• “Island of Peace: In a hectic, busy world, Bowen provides residents with a sense of calm, quiet and serenity”;
• “Got your back: We genuinely care about each other. In times of need we can count on our friends and neighbours to be there for us”;
• “First times: First encounters with Bowen Island and our community shape residents’ feelings and beliefs about the island”;
• “Enveloped in community: The importance of people and the sense of belonging”;
• “Connections: The
deep relationship with nature, others, community and self”;
• “I feel blessed: The genuine gratitude and good
fortune residents feel living on Bowen”.
Those core themes overlap strongly – a good sign, says the report.
“When core themes are as interrelated as these, our experience strongly suggests that we have in fact captured the essence of our research,” the report says. “We have discovered what we’ve set out to find.”
With the residents’ survey in place, the working group’s next steps are to finish its research with the business community and present it in February, with the goal of coming up with initial branding items, including visual concepts and a
tagline, by June of 2016.
“All the pieces are in place to articulate Bowen Island’s Community Brand – the people, the resources and the plan,” said Economid Development Committee chair Gordon Ganong.
The EDC will be asking council to endorse the group’s timelines for the plan at its next regular meeting in January.
The Branding Working Group consists of the EDC along with Owen Plowman, Chair of the Conservancy, Jan Stevens, Chair and founder of the Bowen Accommodation Association, David Shadbolt, Past Chair of Tourism Bowen and Chris Staples, Founding Partner of Rethink Canada, one of two local organizations that is contributing in-kind support to the branding exercise along with Storytellings, which provided the research.
