The economic development officers of small- and medium-sized municipalities in North America have a similar goal: to promote their communities as logical alternatives to major urban centres for businesses seeking to expand or relocate.
But, which businesses to approach? What kind of information will attract business? How to comb through the available data about their community? And how to do this on budgets much smaller than their big-city competitors?
These are questions that govtech startup Townfolio answers, using open data to build community profiles that can link municipalities and business.
Saskatoon-based Townfolio, launched in 2016, is the bootstrapped creation of CEO Ryley Iverson and COO Davie Lee, who had both worked with the Futurpreneur program, Lee in Toronto and Iverson in Saskatchewan, guiding young entrepreneurs. The pair identified the same problem: that small-town officials had neither the training nor the resources to do all the roles required for business promotion — from gathering the data, to making it digestible, to loading it on a website.
Townfolio offers the opportunity for municipal economic development officers to go to the site, post key opportunities in their communities or list the types of businesses they hope to attract, while businesses looking to relocate or expand can use the site to view the options open to them, while gathering the data necessary to make smart business decisions.
The key opportunities as identified by the economic development officers are right on the home page: at this writing, three small communities in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba need a car wash; other communities are looking for fitness gyms, breweries, meat processing plants, pet stores and training schools.
Townfolio enriches the information pool by drawing on 50 open data sets — Statistics Canada census and Business Register data, CMHC summaries, Canada Revenue Agency statistics, Environment Canada weather records, local utility rates, and other sources — to prepare community-specific charts and graphs, all key to making the right business decision.
Although Townfolio hosts this information, its revenue comes from embedding, and constantly refreshing, the presentations on the client municipality’s home page.
Iverson says this is just the surface of data possibilities in Canada. Townfolio’s launch into the United States (they have five American client municipalities) has shown them that Canadian data resources could be richer.
“We’re particularly lagging behind in deeper labour force data,” he says. “There’s a definite need for Stats Can to do a better job with labour force data.”
He says that Canada is so far behind the U.S. in open data availability, “that probably from one open data source (in the U.S.) we could gather more data on their entire country, than we could for all of Canada for all the websites we go on.”
Townfolio’s connection with Canada’s Open Data Exchange has helped the company make connections and see alternatives. Iverson says he is particularly appreciative that ODX is advocating for more and better data: “We appreciate that ODX pushes the envelope.”
He wondered if government will continue to be the prime source for community data.
“We’re scratching the surface and playing to industry standards, as they are, with data, but now we’re starting to rewrite what those industry standards should be . . . I often wonder, who has a better snapshot on demographics, say population. Does Stats Canada have that, or do Facebook and Telus have a better understanding? I think it’s Facebook and Telus.”
This observation was reinforced this month after Iverson and Lee participated as panelists at the Ottawa-based Global Economic Summit in Africa, held in Lagos, Nigeria.
Companies like Townfolio might have challenges mining open data in the developing world.
“It’s really hard to have accurate census data in developing countries,” says Iverson. “And that’s where the telcoms or Facebook or social media — maybe they are the ones who have this data.”
For now, Townfolio’s focus is on Canada and the U.S. “We’re evaluating new market opportunities based on connections,” says Iverson, “rather than trying to flip over all the rocks. You could kill yourself trying to.”
Govtech, he says, is on the verge of becoming The Next Big Thing.
“We’re three to five years away from it going ‘boom.’ I’m glad we’re ahead of the curve. There will come a time, just like fintech and AI, it’ll be the new rage.”
Iverson says other entrepreneurs will catch on that government contracts are dependable sources of revenue: “It’s annoying sometimes to do business with government, but they pay their bills.”
