Sapporo Convention Bureau
SDG Strategy for a Destination Management Organisation
September 2020
Designated as one of Japan’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Future City, Sapporo City began a journey in 2016 to build its capacity to efficiently contribute to UN SDGs. Although the city of Sapporo and Hokkaido Prefecture have both announced their SDG strategies and goals, there are no current formal mechanisms for the Sapporo Convention Bureau (SCB) to advocate for the role of business events in the contribution to the SDG strategy in the city, and hence would like to develop this.
#MEET4IMPACT created a four-phase mandate in order to gradually build the capacity and the strategic focus of the SCB
Sapporo Convention Bureau built their capacity through:
Developing their resources
Building their strategic focus
Further steps involved the development of a collaborative model between the SCB, its local stakeholders and a global ecosystem of changemakers. The SCB have also identified indicators to analyse and measure the contribution of their events and their actors to the SDGs, and they will be developing tools for their internal and external stakeholders to register their contribution.
By developing a formal strategy on how a DMO can contribute to the UN SDGs and leveraging these to amplify the positive impact catalysed by business events attracted to the city, the Sapporo Convention Bureau will seize a position of leadership and spearhead a new way of planning and hosting business events which will increase its brand reputation considerably.
It will also position itself as an important actor working towards the contribution to the local and national governments priorities for achieving the SDGs as part of the Japan SDG Future City initiative.