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Article published 20/02/2020

Delivering information and inspiration

Our iCentre in Jedburgh is a hub for the Scottish Borders and beyond. We promote the wide range of visitor experiences that the region and the whole of Scotland has to offer; from outdoor adventure to our wonderful scenery to historic attractions and food & drink experiences.

Being the only iCentre representing the Scottish Borders, our Jedburgh team looked at how we could attract more footfall into the iCentre by working more with the local community.

We’re happy to say that results so far have been excellent and we’re looking to capitalise on this for 2020/21. Here’s some highlights…

Part of the community

The Jedburgh Marketing Group was set up to promote the town and its businesses to the wider community and beyond. We invited them to hold their meetings in the iCentre, so that they could visit our centre – some for the first time – but also to see what we do and how we can help to promote their businesses and events to our visitors.

As a result, we hosted a reception for the visitors from our twin town in Malestroit in France. All of the visitors – and Jedburgh hosts – were given a discount voucher so that they could indulge in our Shop Local products. We had repeat visitors from several in the group over that weekend.

We also replaced the Information boards outside the iCentre promoting the town and the new Blue Plaque trail, these were all worked on in conjunction with the marketing group.

And we now have a presence on a big new information board in the middle of town which advertises ourselves and the three main visitor sites in the town.

Our local “Walk It “group (short volunteer led walking group for over OAP’s) meet weekly just outside our building. We look after their log books and are happy to invite them in to shelter when the weather isn’t great. During Christmas we invited them in for a mince pie and a drink pre-Christmas. Quite a few of the group had either not been in the iCentre at all or had not been in for a few years.

Shop Local

Our Shop Local initiative provides a platform for craft makers, artists and designers to promote and sell their products to visitors via our iCentre network. 

The initiative is aimed at artisans without a retail platform and has been developed to provide a unique sales channel for small businesses producing ‘Made in Scotland’ products. As part of the Shop Local initiative, local suppliers are invited to be part of iCentre meet the maker events to engage with visitors and share their local supplier ‘Made in Scotland’ story.

We’ve had a successful year for retail which has seen our figures increase by 23% year to date.

Jed Shed

The local ‘Jed Shed’ have volunteered to refurbish our garden planters and benches. In return we’re going to make one of our two benches into a ‘Happy to Chat’ bench. The campaign is aimed at combatting loneliness and improving mental health and wellbeing. More on this to come.

Tickets

Our iCentre provide a ticketing service for our visitors and we currently offer a range of tickets for the likes of Lothian Buses, Thirlestane Castle, Jedburgh Abbey and Abbotsford House. We can also support the local community by selling tickets for them, for example, we’ve worked with the local Instrumental Band for an event they held.

Because of our proactive approach we’ve managed to increase our overall total ticket sales for the year by 45%.

If you’d like to use the iCentre as an avenue to sell tickets, then please do pop in and ask us about it.

Exploring the Scottish Borders

The team can never know too much and always aim to improve on their product knowledge. To do that, they get out and about across the Scottish Borders to explore local businesses.

The team have enjoyed trips around the local area to Harestanes new play park, Thirlestane, Abbotsford, Jim Clark Museum, Schloss Roxburghe Hotel, Monteviot House and Gardens as well as enjoying the Castle of Light in Edinburgh. We’re always planning trips, so If you’d like us to come and see you then please get in touch.

Jedburgh team out and about

Pop in!

Whether you’ve not visited our Jedburgh iCentre before, or it’s been a while since you’ve been, we’d love for you to pop in and meet the team soon. Let’s have a chat with you about how we can work together.

 

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Visitor information

Learn more about our approach to visitor information through the channels we know visitors use to maximise our reach and influence in our key markets.