FCDC, Proximity Park

The Franklin County Development Council recruits business to Ottawa, Kansas, an hour south of Kansas City down I-35. Their whole job is convincing a company to build its next warehouse or plant there, and their website is one of the first places that decision gets made or lost.

The people that help companies decide where to locate are called site selectors, and there aren’t many of them. Two of the biggest names in the field gave advice that shaped the design solution.

One of the strongest insights came from Mark Sweeney at McCallum Sweeney. It’s misleading, he said, to think selectors just browse the web for locations. Their process is disciplined: define the region, screen it, get on the ground, collect primary information from interviews. The website is where they go to get the specific local facts they can’t get anywhere else, once a place is already on the list.

Donovan shared the flip side: Roughly 40 percent of site selection work goes through professional selectors, and the other 60 percent is companies doing it themselves or leaning on a lawyer. This second group wants the quality-of-life data (schools, cost of living, what’s within an hour’s drive) that the site selector pros already have.

So I built the site around the selector’s disciplined process while offering the quality-of-life data that the second group needs. A set of SEO landing pages gives downloadable data packets in exchange for an email, so the anonymous research visit turns into a contact the council could follow up on.

FCDC and their partners had already run the messaging through StoryBrand, in tandem with the selector research. The site selector is the hero of the story, not Franklin County. What they want is a location that “clicks,” the moment everything about a site lines up.

The interviews revealed that a main selector fear is getting burned on a call they championed. Franklin County is the guide with a plan, and the plan got a name: the SNAP Shot, a Simple Needs Assessment Plan. Answer a few questions, get a site plan back, take a ten-minute call, in place of a bare “contact us.”

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The style tiles worked the visual system out in parallel. Aside from the council’s red brand color, the palette was earthy and grounded to harken to the land being represented.

The business park in the middle of all this needed a name. Proximity Park was one of several we put on the table, for how close it sits to the I-35 logistics corridor.

I sketched logo ideas for several: Helix Opportunity Park, Prairie Spirit Park, Heartland Opportunity Park, and Proximity Park, which now exists as a 300-acre, state-certified shovel-ready site.