The Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce looks at the future — and sees digging, lots of digging on Broadway as the 8-year light rail project takes shape. The Chamber is approaching this challenge in an interesting way — studying what it is that people love, and don’t love, about the hill. Wrote about this effort to “brand” Capitol Hill awhile back — as I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to part of some of the branding discussion, I asked if I could share some of what the Chamber has learned with you.

From a telephone survey conducted with about 300 Seattle-area residents, here are some of the numbers the Chamber is considering:

First, a quick look at a question directly related to a key goal for a neighborhood marketing effort — how to get people to visit the area more often. Here’s how often Seattle residents said they come to Capitol Hill — and the top reasons why they said they don’t come more often.

Hmm, not sure the new bike parking will help with the above. But I propose “Capitol Hill has clean and safe parking” as our new slogan. Catchy.

I liked the following dataset. The survey question was open ended, by the way, so no answer options were provided. These people said The Internet without prompting. Smart people!

Now, let’s play word association. What first comes to mind for you?

There’s a lot of gay in these top answers. When Seattle thinks Capitol Hill, it thinks entertaining gay youth on Broadway.

And they think Seattle.

I made reference to the data in this final graph in the recent thread discussing why CHS readers leave the hill. Included in the respondents were about 40 hill residents. This graph compares non-hill residents vs. hill residents by what areas of the city they visit besides Capitol Hill. I include Northgate because it is our biggest difference from the rest of Seattle — the rest are Seattle’s top non-hill destinations.

Next steps for the group are to shape the results into a marketing plan for the hill and develop messages to help promote the neighborhood through the challenging light rail construction period. You’ll probably see signs and banners someday that were born of this process. You might scoff at the notion and attempts to market a place — yeah, we made fun of the Chamber’s walking map, we admit. But it’s good to see data at play in the conversation.

Thanks to the Chamber and Kite, Inc. for the survey data.