Illustration by Annie Davidson
Photographs by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios
Styling by Shalene Enz
Pam Seidl was armed and ready. She had a plan and, more importantly, she had the money to make it happen.
Coming off a record-setting year in 2019 when direct visitor spending in the Fox Cities had surpassed $500 million for the first time ever, the Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau executive director had dreams that were as big as her budget. Years of investing in infrastructure like the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, Fox Cities Exhibition Center and Community First Champion Center were paying off. The future of tourism was bright.
In early 2020, Seidl’s vision centered around growing the local economy by bringing large groups — meetings, conventions, sports tournaments, Broadway performances — to the aggregate of 19 communities that make up the Fox Cities.
“I was ready to go into my November board meeting and say ‘Here’s how I’m going to spend all this extra money,’” Seidl says, clearly amused by the naivety of her pre-pandemic self. “If I had known then what I know now…”
When COVID-19 hit and travel came to an abrupt halt in March 2020, that surplus got put to use differently. It turned out to be the lifeboat the organization needed to weather the tsunami as tourism all but ceased.
Fast forward three years and the tourism landscape is unrecognizable from those early months of the pandemic. Last year, direct visitor spending in the Fox Cities skyrocketed to a record-breaking $558 million, up 20% from 2021. This spending pushed the total economic impact of tourism in the Fox Cities to $729 million.
Seidl attributes the Fox Cities’ quick comeback to its forward-thinking investments.
“The community had been really focusing and investing in tourism. Because we were at the stage where we were, we bounced back faster,” she says. “The investments we had made helped us.”
Now with a fresh brand, new visitor center and a recently completed destination master plan, Seidl is ready to reimagine the future of Fox Cities tourism.
“We’ve got the secret sauce; we know how to do this,” she says. “We’ve seen these huge jumps [in visitor spending] because we’ve made these investments, so in order to keep growing we need to keep investing in our product and infrastructure, and our destination master plan is going to be the guiding document for where we make those next investments.”
“Really everything we do is for the local residents. Everything we do is to bring more people to this area to generate economic activity to make things better for our community.”
– Pam Seidl, executive director, Fox Cities Convention & Visitors Bureau
Honoring originality
At the core of the FCCVB’s work is collaboration and the local community, even though so much of its effort extends beyond the Fox Cities’ borders.
“Really everything we do is for the local residents,” Seidl says. “Everything we do is to bring more people to this area to generate economic activity to make things better for our community.”
In 2020, Seidl and her team launched a new regional brand, Fox Cities Originals, to better represent the entire area and entice tourists. That meant moving away from the Fox Cities’ previous identity as Wisconsin’s Shopping Place.
“As retail has evolved, we wanted to make sure we could focus on a brand where everybody can play in all 19 municipalities we serve,” Seidl says. “Fox Cities Originals positions the area as a lifestyle brand, really leveraging the original and entrepreneurial spirit that exists here and this ties into greater economic development.”
From exploring the Niagara Escarpment to ice skating at The Plaza at Gateway Park to sipping a dirty snowball at Cleo’s Brown Beam Tavern, the brand encourages visitors to discover their original Fox Cities experience, whatever it may be.
This emphasis on originality and innovation dovetails into an employee recruitment and retention strategy for local employers, Seidl says, fostering an area where original thinking, makers and entrepreneurs are highly valued. “We’re really leveraging that spirit of originality and those unique experiences you can only have here in the Fox Cities,” she says.
Matt Carpenter, executive director of The History Museum at the Castle and secretary of the FCCVB board of directors, says the new brand is as ambitious as it is effective.
“A lot of communities in Wisconsin have a very obvious draw. That isn’t necessarily the case in the Fox Cities, where a multitude of things make up the draw,” he says. “It takes more work and creativity to communicate that to the outside world, and I think [the FCCVB] is doing an exceptional job doing that.”
Of course, marketing is meaningless if you don’t have the assets to back it up. This is why over the last five years the FCCVB has led major infrastructure projects including the $31 million Fox Cities Exhibition Center in 2018 and the $30 million Community First Champion Center in 2019. Both required the monumental task of gaining buy-in from 10 Fox Cities municipalities that would contribute hotel room tax revenue to fund the projects.
Jennifer Stephany, executive director of Appleton Downtown Inc., remembers the many long meetings that took place leading up to the opening of the exhibition center.
“It really fell on Pam’s shoulders to share information with every one of the municipalities, but there was strong support especially from those of us in the industry to see this come to fruition,” she says. “We really did have to support the concept as much as support each other. I feel like we did that very successfully as a community.”
“Pam’s not afraid to lean into the vision. She’s not afraid to do the hard work.”
– Jennifer Stephany, executive director, Appleton Downtown Inc.
The Community First Champion Center, a 164,000-square-foot indoor sports facility with both ice and hard-court surfaces, is another community success story. Sports tournaments and games took place on 48 of 52 weekends in 2022 — the Champion Center hosted activities on 357 days last year.
Seidl says weekend tournaments draw visiting teams and spectators from across the Midwest, generating $8 million of annual economic impact. But during the week, the facility provides opportunities for local athletes like those from NHM Hockey, Valley Figure Skating and Lawrence University Women’s Hockey to practice and train.
Convening partners on large-scale infrastructure projects is but one of Seidl’s talents, Stephany says. She says Seidl also has the unique ability to envision long-range goals and has the grit to get them done.
“Pam’s not afraid to lean into the vision. She’s not afraid to do the hard work,” she says. “And, I mean, it’s a lot of hard work to get an asset like the Fox Cities Exhibition Center or Community First Champion Center built in our community. But she leaned in 100% and always does.”
Investing in the Fox Cities
Many residents are surprised to learn that the FCCVB awards grants to tourism development projects including attractions, amenities, interactive experiences and high-impact traveling exhibitions that generate overnight hotel stays.
The FCCVB is primarily funded through hotel room tax, a percentage of which is reserved specifically for its Tourism Development Grant program. This grant program, which Seidl calls her “product development fund,” was written into the FCCVB’s bylaws when the organization was founded in 1988. For 2023, 33% of the FCCVB’s operating revenue has been allocated to the grant fund.
“We are a sales and marketing organization, but if you don’t have a product to sell we gotta make that product better,” Seidl says. “The whole point is to make the visitor experience better, and having that fund established in 1988 was visionary.”
Since its founding, the FCCVB has granted nearly $11 million through the TDG program. Grants, which have ranged from $1,200 to $1 million, have supported projects including updates to local trails and venues such as Fox Cities Stadium and the Barlow Planetarium, as well as exhibits at The Building for Kids Children’s Museum and Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass.
The History Museum at the Castle in downtown Appleton has received two Tourism Development Grants — one for its AKA Houdini exhibit in 2004 and a $100,000 grant to construct its forthcoming local history exhibit, “You Are Here.” The exhibit, for which the museum is wrapping up a $1.6 million capital campaign, will take over the museum’s 3,100-square-foot lower-level exhibit space and is scheduled for installation early next year.
Carpenter says the FCCVB has also supported the museum with grants that support traveling exhibits like “Gridiron Glory: The Best of the Pro Football Hall of Fame” and “GUITAR: The Instrument That Rocked The World.”
“The number of nonprofit organizations in the Fox Cities and the country in general is growing exponentially, so it is a real challenge to find the funding for high-price-tag experiences like these nationally traveling exhibits,” Carpenter says. “In some cases, these grants are the difference between being able to bring the exhibit to the community or not.”
When the FCCVB offers high-level financial investment, it demonstrates to potential donors there’s confidence in the project and helps rally support, Carpenter says.
“People don’t want to be the first one in — it seems more risky. When the CVB comes in, and they tend to come in early, it’s a game changer for us because it signals to the rest of the community that an organization that understands the landscape is behind the project,” he says.
Seidl understands the tourism landscape better than anyone. She has been with the FCCVB for nearly 21 years — first as marketing manager and as executive director since 2012 — and has served on the Destinations Wisconsin board for the past six years, being elected board chair this year.
Whether at work or volunteering, Seidl’s steady leadership style means what you see is what you get, Carpenter says.
“Pam is straightforward — she doesn’t overstate her case,” he says. “She’s very levelheaded, so that success is based on her and her staff’s authentic understanding of the current tourism business, but also a deliberate and measured response to what they see coming in the future. It’s such a refreshing, practical and honest approach to community development.”
The next big things
Last year, tourism exceeded expectations in many ways. Led by strong sports tournaments and leisure travel business, 2022 hotel occupancy trended at pre-pandemic levels and room revenues were the highest on record.
And yet, Seidl has her sights set on the future. After a yearlong development process with consulting group MMGY NextFactor, the FCCVB’s new destination master plan provides a strategic guide to tourism and community development over the next decade. The plan focuses on needed infrastructure, facilities, services, attractions and events.
Two initiatives on which Seidl sees the FCCVB taking a lead role are the development of an indoor music venue and supporting more winter-friendly events. Creating a vibrant, year-round destination with a mix of experiences means developing those that are not weather dependent.
Growing on the strength of Mile of Music and the area’s musical notoriety, Seidl believes one of the next feasibility studies the FCCVB will conduct will be centered on the potential for a large-capacity indoor music venue that will complement the theater space that currently exists in the Fox Cities.
“Those infrastructure projects seem to be a place where we can play a strategic role in getting thought leaders and partners to the table to discuss what that would look like and how we would do it,” Seidl says.
Stephany, for one, will be waiting for the call.
“There’s this collaborative nature to the work that gets done in the world of tourism. We are all in it to win it — we all want to succeed here,” she says. “The greater [FCCVB] can move the needle, the better for all of us. So when Pam calls and says, ‘I need you,’ you are darn right we are all going to say yes in a heartbeat.”
“Pam is straightforward — she doesn’t overstate her case. It’s such a refreshing, practical and honest approach to community development.”
– Matt Carpenter, executive director, The History Museum at the Castle
