How To Prepare an Economic Development Plan for Your Community

As the global economy skids to a halt, many industries are finding it hard to recover from a financial downturn that has affected growth, sales and revenues. And as the government deals with the stiff economy through bailouts, local communities have no other recourse but to establish associations that can draft an economic development plan and eventually salvage what’s left of their drowning industries. Below are simple tips on how you can help your community establish such a plan and stifle the impacts of the economic crisis.

1. Establish a working board. Drafting an economic development plan is a gargantuan task that no individual can easily achieve. You need to put brains together in order to come up with a polished and efficient direction for the economy of your community. Since an economic development plan will affect every person in your entire community, it’s important to agree on a common understanding about the direction of your community’s economy. Having more people in the group by establishing an economic council can also enable you to delegate tasks and divide labor among the members.
2. Know the current state of your community’s economy. Get reports from city hall about the current placement of your community in the market. Have there been significant growth areas?  What are the pain points and choke points?  What industries have flourished in the past few years?  Before you can begin drafting future plans for your community’s economy, you need to know the current state it is in to give you better insight about which measures to put in place.
3. Determine the assets of your community. Is your community rich in useful raw materials?  Or maybe your resources are focused on labor and manpower?  Determine the assets that your community can provide to firms and companies inside and outside your company in order to determine which factors and industries you should focus on. It is all right if you produce a multi-faceted economic development plan, but a community with a comparative advantage over other communities usually grows faster.
4. Study the current market trends nationally and globally. Get a feel of the ongoing business trends in the market today, because what you may offer regionally may not be needed or marketable nationally and globally. If possible, commission market research among different market segments to get a pulse of your community’s prospective customers. This will give you a more comprehensive and deeper insight about the different sectors you’d be tapping for your community economic development projects.
5. Draft both a short-term and long-term economic development plan. It’s good to think about the immediate plans you have for your community, but it’s better to make little investments that can greatly benefit the future of your community. Place some measures like incentives for certain businesses or promotion of tourism to make sure that you can keep the growth of your economy stable and the income stream steady.

In drafting an economic development plan, prepare to crunch a lot of numbers, because these measures need feasibility studies and in-depth research to make sure that you are not spending on things that will not benefit your greater community.