A Complete Solution

The Economic Development Corporation of Sarasota County’s mission is to connect entrepreneurs, business leaders and major corporations to new and existing development opportunities in western central Florida. In 2018 the team was seeking to beef up their online presence with reliable data and a rich user experience that includes comprehensive virtual site visits.

Destin Wells, VP of Business Development for the EDC of Sarasota County, describes why he switched to GIS WebTech from his previous sites and buildings provider. “I first met Ron and Michael at an FEDC conference a couple of years ago when we were coming up on renewal with our previous vendor. We needed a quality sites and buildings database that I could rely on without having to take up an entire staff member’s time to manage. The thing that jumped out to me immediately with Recruit was the degree and quality of data integration within a sites and buildings solution. I take my data with a grain of salt, and crosscheck it with a few different resources to see if it’s within a certain margin of error. With my previous provider I was finding too many outliers to make me comfortable with the accuracy of their data. GIS WebTech’s Recruit integrates Esri data, reliable data that I can feel confident about.”

The presence of a global pandemic has accelerated the shift to conducting more business virtually. Destin describes the advantages of using Recruit during virtual site visits with his prospects.

“I have done virtual site tours in online meetings, and I have done virtual site tours in person, where we are sitting together in a conference room and I’ll just pull Recruit up on the big screen and fly prospects through the community. Recruit makes the presentation so much easier because I can answer any question that a client has from within one spot. It eliminates the sloppiness of slogging through a million different tabs and resources that are disjointed and disconnected. I can pull everything up; demographic reports, workforce data, and drive time analysis, quickly and in real time within one complete solution. “

Destin elaborates on the benefits his team has achieved from their partnership GIS WebTech. “One of GIS WebTech’s biggest advantages is the phenomenal customer support. Any time I want to get a hold of someone it is easy and quick. The team is responsive and proactive. GIS WebTech actively solicits feedback, and not just to make clients feel warm and fuzzy, but they actually change and evolve based on needs identified by users. The relationship between our EDC and GIS WebTech is a two-way street. They don’t view learning from their customers as a weakness, instead they embrace it as a way to improve. With our previous provider, you could tell we were not a large account for them and that’s how we were treated.”

“Another huge advantage of Recruit is the real customization throughout the technology. One of the biggest things that we hear from Enterprise Florida is that they don’t want the brochures that come from the brokers. So we were having to take all this time to edit brochures in Adobe, and there was no brand consistency. Now we are able to pull true EDC branded documents for our responses and that really makes our organization look much more professional, that we have got it all together, and that is just hugely important. “

Destin’s team has recently bundled their Recruit with Esri’s ArcGIS and Business Analyst tools to augment their research capabilities. “The ArcGIS and Business Analyst integration is a great example of the way GIS WebTech helps our organization to push the envelope and expand our internal capabilities. We can produce analytic reports and high-quality infographics in a fraction of the time that it took in the past. That’s the kind of company that Economic Development groups want to partner with. We don’t want a passive relationship; we want a technology partner that is going to add value day to day. GIS WebTech does that really well.