Background
- What: Downtown Montréal’s business improvement area
- Who: Glenn Castanheira, executive director of Montréal centre-ville
- Where: Montréal, Quebec
- Product: Moneris Data Services – Consumer Spending Data and Event-Impact Analysis
Montréal centre-ville is downtown Montreal’s Business Improvement Area (‘Société de développement commercial’) – a non-profit organization supporting the development and promotion of the downtown Montréal area. Founded in 1999, and overseeing nearly 5,000 members to date, the organization’s main mission is to contribute to the city’s economic and commercial development, dynamism, influence, and quality of life.
Learn more about Montréal centre-ville from the organization’s executive director, Glenn Castanheira, and what his team was able to accomplish through Moneris’ Consumer Spending Data and Event Impact Analysis report.
Tell us about your role in the organization, and the team that you work with.
As the executive director, I oversee the strategic planning of the organization and everything that has to do with its governance. I establish action plans and represent our organization – whether it be to public officials or speaking on behalf of businesses that we represent.
While our organization has a large scope, we are a small team made up of 10 permanent staff members. This includes project managers, and several managers that oversee a communications team, the public realm, and business intelligence. We also have a crew of roughly 30 members in our cleaning brigade – which is part of our social reintegration program. The program supports men and women who may be going through tough times and are hoping to get back on the right track, by providing a stable income.
What projects are you and your team currently working on?
We have several flagship projects on the go, and quite a few have to do with the beautification and illumination of public spaces in downtown Montréal. As a city that experiences beautiful summers and winters, we are also a large festival city that makes use of its outdoor spaces. But once events die down and the winters get colder, people tend to spend more time in Montreal’s underground city areas. So, we wanted to enhance the experience of our visitors by encouraging people to explore and reappropriate those underutilized areas.
We’ve carried out various initiatives to accomplish this. Since 2021 we’ve installed over 15 kilometres of string lights to illuminate our public spaces. In 2022, we added public furniture such as tables, chairs, sunshades, and incorporated music programming during lunch and dinner hours. These new projects have garnered a lot of positive feedback from the public.
What are some of the biggest challenges facing your organization?
I think in general, operating in public spaces can be tough. Downtown isn’t a place that we can just shut down or ask people to leave, so ensuring that we all live in harmony can be a challenging task.
But another challenge impacting our work is data. In a time where resources are scarce and measuring the impact of our actions is more important than ever, quantifying data to identify key performance indicators and knowing where our actions are successful, is vital.
“We’re lucky that in recent years, there’s been a wide array of business intelligence and data that has allowed us to make enlightened decisions. And a key part of that data has come from Moneris.”
Speaking of Moneris, what was the catalyst to using Moneris as a data service resource?
There are many reasons why we chose to work with Moneris. One being that I grew up in a family business where our restaurant processed payments with Moneris, so I had a strong recognition and trust in the brand.
Moneris was also recommended by our Montréal Centre-ville staff, and upon speaking to their team, we appreciated how keen and open they were to collaborate. Through Moneris Consumer Spending data and Event Impact Analysis report, we were provided strong, high-quality data that was easy to communicate, and helped us understand how we can better invest in our city to support the businesses in our district. We were able to get a realistic picture of how those businesses were performing on a day-to-day or following an event / city activation and obtain other key insights.
What were some insights that you and your team extracted from your data analytics work with Moneris?
We rely on different data types to have a detailed understanding of the impact of our initiatives. One of them is tracking the origin and destination of individuals visiting downtown Montréal, and how long they stayed following a certain activation (i.e., large events like the Canadian Grand Prix, or projects affecting public space such as the inclusion of art or greenery).
Through Moneris, we track mostly trends and conversions, and to illustrate how we tracked this across different segments of our economy, it’s important to note that downtown Montréal has a large concentration of hotels, entertainment areas, restaurants, retail stores and services. We wanted to be able to monitor sales through each of these businesses and learn how they perform in accordance with things like foot traffic or the occupancy in our hotels and other businesses. Moneris’ Consumer Spending and Event Impact Analysis data allowed us to benchmark the performance of our different business segments in respect to these factors and the performance of these segments in comparable areas. This way, we could determine, for example, if higher foot traffic impacts sales in a certain business. And if it doesn’t, then where are people spending their money?
“So far, Moneris’ data has helped us validate assumptions made by our team or partners. Having the data so clearly communicated allowed us to quickly confirm or refute claims, projections, or conclusions.”
How has Moneris’ data helped to strengthen your understanding of a particular sector of business?
One example is our understanding of how consumer habits are changing and how we can help our businesses stay ahead. For example, our surveys showed that one of our visitor’s main reasons for visiting downtown was for leisure. With Moneris Consumer Spending data, we were able to track how much people were spending on restaurants and entertainment, which then prompted us to focus our investments on projects that would enhance consumer spending for those businesses and pushed us to adapt our marketing strategy. Overall, monitoring consumer spending gave us the confirmation that our investments contributed to increased spend for businesses in those sectors.
Can you speak about your experience partnering with Moneris?
I’ve been monitoring the work quite closely, and I can say that we really appreciated how smooth this whole process was, which has been key to our experience. Moneris made this a very seamless, frictionless operation. Speaking on the data, it was very clean, easy to adjust, analyze, interpret, and share. For instance, I was asked to react on the performance of summer tourism in downtown Montréal during an interview, and it took just a few minutes for me to pull out the Moneris data, validate some of that information, and share this with my interviewer.
How do you see your data needs evolving as you continue to work with Moneris?
I expect that our data needs will grow in detail and scope., We’ll want to dig deeper into our large business segments (i.e., hotels, restaurants, retailers, etc.), and monitor how these different segments impact different sectors of the economy. For instance, comparing businesses that are independent versus chains, located on ground floors versus upper floors, or looking at ‘luxury’ versus ‘affordable’.
Additionally, when I joined the Montréal centre-ville team, part of my mandate was modernizing our organization and ensuring we had access to data that would better inform our decisions moving forward. We’ve been developing a dashboard that will allow us to monitor the economic performance of downtown Montréal – one focus area being sales from across different sectors of business (thanks to Moneris data). All these elements, together with an annual report that we’re working on, will build a clear picture of our city’s current social and economic standing.
What do you think the future of Montréal centre-ville looks like?
The future of this organization will focus on continuing to identify what our added value is. The businesses we represent do a fantastic job of running their business, so we really need to show how much of an asset we can be to help them be more profitable and resilient. To do so, we need to question how efficient our actions and initiatives are and how quickly the city can adapt. I also believe we will continue our work with intervening in the beautification and animation of our public spaces, enhancing the downtown experience for everyone.
To learn more about Montréal centre-ville, visit: https://montrealcentreville.ca/
