Lost in unfamiliar territoryWayfinding initiative aims to make Fox Cities more navigable, welcoming to out-of-town visitorsStory by Lee Marie ReinschIT’S SAID THAT FAMILIARITY BREEDS CONTEMPT. But unfamiliarity can breed something unpleasant, too – like lost business, fender benders and cranky visitors – especially if that lack of familiarity is with the local cartography. A Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau program that’s being referred to informally as the Fox Cities way-finding initiative is designed to help visitors navigate their way around the region in a consistent and more calculated manner. “If we can make it easier for consumers to travel in and around our communities, our businesses will thrive and our communities will stay vibrant and growing,” said Bobbie Beckman, executive director of the Kaukauna-based Heart of the Valley Chamber of Commerce. Heart of the Valley is embracing the plan, which calls for around 140 color-coded signs designed to get visitors to the area’s highlighted destinations efficiently and safely. Both the CVB and the Heart of the Valley Chamber are offering grant money for their member communities that participate in the program. The optional signage program combines directional signs with brightly colored icons engineered to let newcomers know where they are in the Fox Cities and where they’re going, with as little extraneous and confusing information as possible, according to Michigan-based Corbin Design, the technical brains behind the plan. “What these signs will do is be consistent in color and shape and provide a series of visual cues,” said Lynn Peters, executive director of the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau.
“WAYFINDING”, ACCORDING TO WEBSTER’S New Millennium Dictionary, incorporates “signs, maps, graphics or audible cues to convey location and directions to travelers.” The late Boston architect Kevin Lynch, who studied with Frank Lloyd Wright, is credited with coining the term in the 1960s. Downtown planning specialists say wayfinding is more than just signage – it also takes into consideration elements of psychology, sociology and intuitive thinking toward travelers’ decision-making. This way-finding program takes into account the fact that, with multiple municipalities comprising the greater Fox Cities area, newcomers don’t always realize when they’ve exited one ‘burb and entered into another. “With 18 communities, you’re covering a lot of territory,” Peters said. Travelers in search of a destination might not know where Appleton ends and Kimberly begins if they miss the cues that locals take for granted. They might not know that the Fox River Mall isn’t actually in Appleton, but in the town of Grand Chute. Or they might not realize that when their plane lands at “the Appleton airport” – more formally the Outagamie County Regional Airport – they’re actually in the town of Greenville. Neenah and Menasha – sometimes called the Twin Cities of the Fox Valley and often combined with a hyphen into the nebulous uni-town Neenah-Menasha – are easy to juxtapose for those who have no personal ties to differentiate them from one another. And with two large lakes, a river, and a number of harbors and channels, one has to wish lots of luck to the out-of-towner relying on the presence of waterfront with which to stay oriented. According to Corbin Design, the audience targeted for the Fox Cities way-finding initiative includes: • Visitors attending sporting events and tournaments; • Those in the area for special events, meetings, conferences, trade shows and conventions; • Vendors, performers, festival volunteers and participants; • and drivers and pedestrians. One of Corbin Design plan’s tenets is, “Consider the first-time visitor.” “We are so close to our communities, we don’t need signs because we know where everything is,” said Peters. But that’s not the case for newcomers, tourists, or even other northeast Wisconsinites who live outside the Fox Cities. In fact, getting disoriented while driving through the Fox Cities has been formally pinpointed as a problem since at least 2004.
Easy to get lost FIVE YEARS AGO, the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau hired the consulting firm Destination Development of Seattle to visit the area as “secret shoppers” and report their impressions on everything from its shopping climate to its navigability. It seems the secret shoppers had some problems locating what’s what and what’s where around the Fox Cities. What the consultants found: Existing way-finding signage is small, sporadic and inconsistent from one community to the next, according to Beckman. The consultants suggested improved signage would help visitors move around the Fox Cities, lengthening visits and increasing spending. Their findings – along with results of a May 2006 local focus group – showed that drivers in the Fox Cities attributed their biggest navigating beefs to these five issues: 1. Lack of signs (39 percent); 2. Confusing intersections (19 percent); 3. Confusing sign messages (18 percent); 4. One-way streets (17 percent); and 5. Turning restrictions (7 percent). The surveys also found that 58 percent of local focus-group respondents felt that visitors to the Fox Cities area “don’t recognize the Fox Cities brand.”
Four distinct areas ITS PROPONENTS SAY the way-finding initiative clarifies local geography for the visitor by dividing the greater Fox Cities area into quadrants: West of the Fox River, Heart of the Valley, Appleton area and the Waterfront. Each quadrant has its own easy-to-recognize logo on a blue background. “Successful wayfinding depends a great deal on simplifying the information presented to first-time visitors so they are not confused by excessive or unnecessary information,” according to Corbin. Sign elements “keep with the scale of the area, supporting way-finding at key decision points and providing reassuring and consistent information,” the Corbin study reads. Such signs shouldn’t “draw attention to themselves or be seen as ‘signage for the sake of signage.’” The Appleton area is identified by a green apple logo on a blue background. The Heart of the Valley area is identified by a pink heart logo on a blue background, while the Waterfront area is identified by a yellow sailboat on a blue background. Lastly, the Fox/West area is identified by a brown fox on a blue sign.
Excuse me, but where are the catfish races? The Greenville Catfish Races attract 10,000 people to the unincorporated community for one weekend each year, and it’s not uncommon for visitors to stop Town Chairman Randy Leiker and ask for directions to the community park. In 2007, more than ripe for new signs, Greenville became the first community to adopt the Fox Cities wayfinding initiative principles. “We had been in the process at the end of the year (2006) of looking at what we wanted to do, and we made up our minds that we wanted the way-finding program,” Leiker said. “We knew where we wanted the arrows pointed, and we knew what we wanted to accomplish with these signs, and the convention and visitors bureau asked us if we would be interested in doing this.” Greenville is a big softball community, and with 800 kids playing in the local youth league, games and tournaments are going on pretty much throughout the summer, Leiker said. That draws lots of out-of-towners. “We have three major highways that go through town, and we felt it would be safer if people had a heads-up before they got to their intersection so they could do their lane changes,” Leiker said. He and his fellow town board of supervisor members looked into the way-finding plan and liked what they saw. They had Greenville sign maker IntelliCAM duplicate the Corbin designs. The town had money set aside for signage anyway, and along with a state grant for signage, Greenville received a grant from the Fox Cities CVB for part of the cost of signs promoting regional attractions, such as the Outagamie County Regional Airport. “It didn’t make sense for us to create our own (signs) and in two or three years when (the Fox Cities wayfinding initiative) kicked off, then make another decision to redo them,” Leiker said. “It was a timing thing. We were in the right place at the right time.”
Greenville was the first Fox Cities municipality to officially sign-on with the Fox Cities way-finding initiative. Its 16 signs cost around $25,000 to make and install, but Greenville didn’t pay that much for them. The Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau provided 50 percent of the installation cost of five regional signs – for a $3,600 discount – and a state Department of Transportation signage grant paid a portion, too, according to Dean Schiller, public works superintendent for the Town of Greenville. Corbin Design estimated the cost of the 140 signs in the Fox Cities way-finding initiative to be around $603,000, plus another almost $151,000 for installation. That computes to over $5,000 per sign – substantially more than the price Greenville paid. The municipalities that opt to join the way-finding initiative would take bids on the sign work itself, following the same procedures they would for bidding on other municipal projects, Peters said, although it’s possible that the communities as a whole could take bids on the project rather than community by community. The signs meet Americans with Disability Act requirements for color contrast, letter size, letter style and form. Consistent, good and clean signage is important for both residents and visitors alike, Beckman said. That’s why the Chamber and CVB are offering help to the local communities to pay for signs. Beckman said the chamber implemented a program to provide up to 50 percent of a community’s remaining costs for implementing the way-finding signs after any contributions it would receive from the CVB’s grant fund. “We understand our local community governments struggle with tight budgets and shrinking financial resources,” Beckman said. “With this grant program, our municipalities will receive an extra boost to get the signage program off the ground.”
An alumna of Ripon College, Lee Marie Reinsch is a freelance writer based in Green Bay. |