Pratt Telecommunity Center, Inc. [April 1999]

Telecommunications and technology-based companies continue to be advocated as potential new economic development directions for many rural communities. For many of these communities this has translated into an effort to secure a major technology-based company or the pursuit of high capacity telecommunications, hoping it will, in turn, lead to future economic prosperity. Call centers or telemarketing businesses quickly become the focus of many communities and many Departments of Commerce work with site locators to identify prospective communities who have the economic development package to support these businesses. Unfortunately, these businesses have become very discriminating in selecting these communities. At the same time, those communities who are successful find that there is little transfer of benefit to other sectors of their economies. While many communities continue to retain this focus, others are looking for alternatives.

The Center has been in operation for two years and in this time it has attracted national attention for the uniqueness of and successfulness of the business. The Center is a public accessible, technology center that provides access to advanced technologies and telecommunications. What is most important, the Center has employed an attitude that while it is supportive to those locally who are changing with technology, its attitude is progressive when using the technology to draw attention to the assets of the community. The Center currently offers access to interactive videoconferencing, satellite downlinks, access to computers, printers, scanners, multimedia devices, and document imaging capabilities. These technologies, many that are not available in most rural communities, provide an environment that allows local businesses, organizations and schools the opportunity to utilize resources around the country and to become more cost effective and profitable. The Center has also demonstrated how these technologies can be used by businesses and organizations to expand their markets across the world.

While the technology available within the Center is comprehensive, it is the attitude and pioneering efforts undertaken by the Center that have proven to be most important. The Center has drawn attention to the community of Pratt and to local businesses and organizations using the amazing power of the Internet and the expertise available at the Center. The Center is still the only business in Kansas and one of a small handful in the country that has used the Internet to cover local events, like the Miss Kansas Pageant, Kansas Sampler Festival, Pratt County Fair, and local sports, including football, basketball, wrestling and baseball. These events proved that the technology could be used to "bring back" people who had left the community earlier and to attract visitors from any where in the world. More significantly, these initial events opened the door to the Center hosting events that weren't even happening in the community, yet to the rest of the world it appeared as if they were. The Center was the first to cover the 4A-5A-6A Kansas High School State Wrestling Tournament and the Kansas High School 5A State Basketball Tournament on the Internet live. Neither of these events would have ever been held in Pratt, but appeared as if they had by bringing people through the Pratt community web site. Most important, the Center proved that a rural community could actually reach into an urban community (Wichita and Topeka) take an event they had secured and bring traffic to the community without all the negative impacts. Instead, Pratt was in a position to create an economic pull from these larger communities. In less than a year the Center has drawn approximately 65,000 visitors to the community as a result of these activities and while they were visiting, were led to information about local attractions, schools, churches, scenery, businesses and even local opinions. And it's not going to stop. By the time you get this letter, the Center will have made arrangements to cover other events, including coverage of the All Star Shrine Football Game in July from Wichita, along with some other interesting events including golf, rodeo, football and much more.

While much of what the Center has done in the past two years is focused on bringing attention to the community, it can't be ignored what has occurred within Pratt. Pratt is a community of 6,000 whose uses of technology and future prospects were no different from almost any other rural community. Two years ago the community had a single computer store (one had just recently closed), a single Internet Service Provider (the local community college), approximately 60 people with access to the Internet, no businesses with web sites, an unvisited community web site, little interest in computer education, and the same large, distant telecommunications company who had shown little interest in the community for years and who offered few encouraging words.

Today Pratt has three computer stores, each with prices that are competitive with larger companies located in Wichita, four profitable Internet Service Providers (more Internet Service Providers per capita than any other community in the world with multiple providers), approximately fifteen hundred Internet users (the fourth, and newest Internet Service Provider has signed up 270 customers in the last three months, more than double the number of users they had signed up in the year prior in all of their surrounding communities), approximately fifty businesses and organizations with web sites (most were developed by the Center), the most active community web site in Kansas whose growth in Internet traffic is nearly quadrupling every one hundred days while Internet traffic is doubling for the rest of the world, annually several hundred people who participate in a variety of educational programs, a telephone company that has had to upgrade local facilities because Internet use was so high it was affecting 911 service and now a second telephone company that has announced it will be entering the local market, not as a reseller of service, but as a direct competitor for local and regional service, all to be capitalized through their own money.

Other indirect benefits have also occurred within the community as a result of the Center. The community has hosted two conferences: Telepower '97 and WaterPack '99, both of which required direct participation from the Center in both organizing and hosting the conference. The community and the Center have been covered in many newspaper and television segments in larger communities, such as Great Bend, Garden City, Dodge City, Topeka, Wichita and Kansas City, discussing the changes and opportunities created in the community. The Center has been selected as one of the three major rural initiatives in the country and will participate in a conference in April where the conference participants will visit the Center from their location in New Orleans using interactive videoconferencing. The Center will be discussed at a conference in California on retail marketing by a consultant brought to Pratt who, once he visited the Center and the community's web site, described the Center as a "goldmine for the community." During an economic development session held at the Center the consultant who was brought in to assist the community was surprised to find that the participants didn't realize they were sitting in their economic development future.