Mayor Bevilacqua: Vaughan receives prestigious award from Economic Developers Association of Canada

The following statement was issued by Vaughan Mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua after a special presentation during the March 22 Council meeting:

“I am pleased to announce the City of Vaughan's Economic Development department has received the prestigious Marketing Canada Award from the Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) for the vaughanbusiness.ca website.

"EDAC is Canada's national association of economic development professionals, with nearly 1,000 members from municipalities across Canada. The association's mission is to enhance the professional competence of economic development professionals and ensure placement of qualified people in the field of economic development, advance economic development as a distinct, recognized and self-governing profession, and contribute to Canada's overall well-being. The Marketing Canada Awards competition recognizes the promotional and marketing efforts of municipalities that work to improve the economic well-being of Canadians.

"Vaughanbusiness.ca is a platform that delivers on community economic development and investment attraction objectives. It contains a wide range of content, with a clean look and seamless features that are easy to navigate. As part of the initiative to implement a new website, City staff also developed new branding for Vaughan Business. The goal was to ignite economic prosperity and highlight Vaughan's transition from a suburban city to an ambitious, up-and-coming urban centre.

"Development of the new website included extensive stakeholder engagement. While vaughanbusiness.ca was built to service multiple audiences, the key audiences are local Vaughan businesses and prospective businesses looking to expand their markets in Vaughan. The Economic Development team embarked on this journey to create a website that meets or exceeds industry best practices and pushes boundaries for service excellence – and the new Vaughan Business website does just that. It supports various multimedia formats, including video, photography, blogs, forums, and contains robust data features that City staff will maintain and update on an ongoing basis.  

"Other key elements include features to help users navigate program titles and services, a self-serve data resource with interactive dashboards, integrated tagging, a tools and resource page and a mega menu that shows the entire main navigation menu. It also includes visitvaughan.ca – a dedicated page for tourists and visitors, and a COVID-19 resource and information page.

"I want to congratulate the City’s Economic Development team for receiving this impressive award and for going above and beyond to serve our business community in these extraordinary times. This project demonstrates the best of what our city has to offer and contributes to Vaughan's robust service offerings to support local business and attract investment opportunities.”

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