The Northfield Downtown Development Corporation has long championed “Keeping Your Money in Northfield”. Whether it’s joining “America Unchained Day“, recognizing homegrown efforts to spread the message (including a few unconventional approaches), or simply reminding folks about all the things available locally, it’s a message we come back to again and again.

We’ve done some rather focused efforts on that theme, including our annual collaboration with the Northfield News for holiday shopping, promoting Northfield’s offerings during big weekends at the colleges, and, most recently, sending out Patty Cash as downtown’s ambassador to the community. This year our regular promotional pieces have the tag line “Be Local”, we’re entering into a new collaborative effort with the Chamber to unify our message around this theme, and are hoping to help the EDA identify opportunities to spread the word, locally and regionally.

The discussions on the NDDC’s Events and Marketing and Communication and PR Committees, as well as our recent discussion with the Chamber, generally include a common concept: we don’t want to preach. Although there are truly significant economic benefits to a community resulting from shopping locally, we recognize that people make their own decisions for their own reasons.

Therefore, both locally and nationally, the message seems to be morphing into “Local First”. As I did in my recent Valentine’s Day post, we’re encouraging folks to think about the local options first. Between our two retail districts, Downtown and “Uptown”, you can get pretty much anything in Northfield.

So, next time you need something, think Northfield first. Your local economy, as well as your friends and neighbors, will thank you for it.