Partners come in all shapes and sizes. Like our partnership with the Fairfield County Business Journal. Every week we work with the Journal to produce this page to give you, the reader, a little window into all the great things that are happening in the county. In this column, you also get to hear from one of our members, now more than 260 strong. This partnership has allowed us a platform for getting in front of a business audience and in return, we provide interesting content for the paper—a win/win for all.
Recently, the Cultural Alliance met with Hotel Zero Degrees to talk about how we can partner with it. We have both recently opened our doors in Norwalk. The Cultural Alliance has a new office at Mathews Park, while the hotel has a beautiful new urban-chic hotel on Main Avenue, just off the Merritt Parkway. The hotel is a uniquely designed architectural work of art, but it doesn’t stop there. Rather than buying off-the-rack art to complement the design, it has totally gone local. I was so impressed to see that the entire hotel is filled with art by members of the Silvermine Arts Center Artist Guild, which is just up the road in New Canaan.
In our meeting, hotel officials wanted to know how we could partner. What they needed from us was to understand more about what the greater Norwalk area had to offer their guests. They were most interested in being “in the know” so they can help their guests find unique things to do that are local and exciting. We offered lots of ideas and they agreed that FCBuzz.org, our online events calendar, is a great resource that they will promote to their guests through in-room advertising, inserts in the guest book and by posting our logo on their website. They also want to see us succeed, so they offered to host a donor cultivation event for us in the future. This month we’ll be at their grand-opening party, along with the Silvermine Arts Center, cheering each other on to success, because that’s what partARTnership looks like.