Lisa Meriwether knew her time had started to make an impact when she went out to dinner one night.
Going to Golden Leaf Bistro, she looked at the menu.
There it was: SoSi scallops.
“I was like, ‘you are freaking kidding me,'” she recalled saying. She stood up and went to the bar where owner William Gentry was sitting.
“I want to just say thank you for this,” she said. She was sure patrons were quizzing the waitstaff about “SoSi,” giving them a way to weave the playful tourism brand into a conversation.
She chalked it up to a little win.
With Caesars Virginia putting Danville on the map as a tourism destination, the Visit SoSi movement is continuing to ramp up efforts to extend a marketing reach to explain why people should come to the Danville area and spend a little time.
It’s starting to work. Danville is being featured in magazines. Social media bloggers and influencers want to talk about this Southern Virginia place with the funny-sounding tourism slogan.
Visit SoSi debuted in May 2023, a week before a temporary casino opened. It’s a play on “so much to do, so much to see” and Southside.
“This is what I was hired to do,” Meriwether said in an interview with the Register & Bee. “As I have told city leadership, there is so much more work to do.”
After first teaching area residents about the attractions in their own backyard, marketing then slowly expanded outward to lure people to the area.
Next year, a new tactic will start. With Amtrak coming through the city, Meriwether wants to make Danville a destination.
Essentially, she wants people in Charlottesville to “get on the train and come on down to Danville,” she said.
Working with tour groups, she’s going to build out marketing initiatives in the metro areas.
She also wants to launch a podcast as a way to do more storytelling about the people and places around Southside.
“Things are happening so fast that it’s hard to keep up,” she said.
Danville and Pittsylvania County are the fastest-growing tourism destinations in the commonwealth, according to data from the Virginia Department of Tourism.
She knows people coming to Caesars Virginia are going there to play the games and enjoy fine dining because of Ramsey’s Kitchen.
“They are coming to enjoy the luxurious accommodations,” she said. “It’s a destination resort.”
How it’s spilling over into the community
Looking at the data, Danville City Manager Ken Larking said it’s hard to know if there’s a direct correlation between the casino and an influx of tax dollars.
But the math sometimes is simple.
“With more people, it means more people are spending more money locally,” he told the Register & Bee. “We’ve seen sales tax revenue go up.”
Business licenses in the city have increased, another indicator of economic prosperity.
“Whether it is directly attributed to Caesars or not, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly a positive,” she said.
Also, new eateries are coming to Danville that five years ago may not have considered the River City as a destination.
“People are starting to feel confident that they can be successful,” Larking said. “It probably has a lot to do with the fact that we have more people coming into our community.”
Meriwether wants people to understand that all of the success and drive comes down to one thing.
It’s a “great” community.
How they are they welcoming more
On top of new businesses coming in, the ones already established are starting a dialogue that was never on the radar before.
Representatives with hotels and attractions are attractions that are talking to each other. There’s even an ongoing roundtable with hotel general managers.
“When we got them in a room together,” she said. The reaction? “This is so cool.”
Now what may have seemed like competitors are starting to work together.
Before a united Visit SoSi — an effort by Danville and Pittsylvania County — information on attractions in the region wasn’t known elsewhere.
Together, it’s formed a destination marketing organization for regional tourism.
At every welcome center in the state, there are brochures on Visit SoSi. In fact, more than 100,000 copies have been distributed.
For five times, Meriwether had to go back to the printer to get more published.
Come July, Meriwether will be starting year four of a five-year tourism master plan, and she’s already thinking about what’s to come with the next master document.