The Sierra County Chamber of Commerce took an initiative this year to venture into a digital transformation of their annual printed Sierra County Visitor's Guide. The Chamber currently budgets and spends close to $16k/year on printed copies of their guide.

While they foresee providing printed guides for visitors, they hope to reduce the printing costs and also gain more on-line presence and provide better service to potential visitors to our county. The result is an app that just went live on Wednesday, May 18th. The app is entitled "Visit Sierra County CA" and can be located in the app store for both iOS and Android devices. The app provides a lot of the same information as the printed guide, but is interactive and makes use of location based services not only for the businesses within the county, but also lists of trails with links for more on-line details. The Chamber of Commerce's list of events is also available on-line and is able to keep more accurate and up to date than a printed version. The response from users who have downloaded and tried the app has been very positive.

The board members of the Chamber of Commerce are Linda Vorecek (President), Cindy Haubl (Vice President), Michael Taylor (Treasurer), Rebecca Mooers (Secretary), Jim Westfall and Sonya Meline. The project was a group effort by the Chamber with over 100 volunteer hours spent on the project. The app was an engagement with VisitWidget and is an extension of the Chamber of Commerce's existing website, so there is just one copy and a centralized location of the information that is on the Chamber's website, app and resulting annual printed guide.

In fact, if you don't have a mobile device you can access the Visit- Widget functionality on the web by visiting www.sierracountychamber. com. Look for the "Plan Your Trip" icon to click and access the VisitWidget functionality, it will just not have some of the same flash and support for location based services as a mobile device. The websites www.visitsierracounty.com and www.discoverdownieville.com will also soon have the same "Plan your Trip" icon and link to access the same functionality and information from the chamber's website.