Pangandaran, a beautiful tourist destination located on the south coast of West Java, has a tourism potential with lots of tourist attractions of beaches and rivers. It has a lot of tourism facilities, such as hotels, inn, motels, cafés, restaurants, and a shopping center which significantly contribute to the local economy. UMKM play an important role in providing these facilities, directly supporting the government target to attract 20 million visitors by 2019.
However, since the tsunami in 2006, the economy has been suffering. It was worsened further by technology disruption challenging the competitiveness of the local tourism businesses. UMKM also bears this burden. The absence of collaboration among the stakeholders was seen as one of the factors resulting in the imbalance of tourism growth within Pangandaran Regency. In this situation, technology can be an effective tool to fix the problem.
The web-based platform can be used as a means to facilitate the collaboration between stakeholders and facilitate the UMKM to market their product. The social media and marketplace can be used to promote the commodity and at the same time getting the confidence of tourists who are frightened of the past disaster. For this reason, DMSN SBM ITB collaborated with Dinas Pariwisata dan Kebudayaan Jawa Barat, creating and socializing the website built to facilitate the collaboration with UMKM. Pantai Selatan Jawa Barat website (http://pantaiselatan.jabarprov.go.id) as the collaborative platform is one of the outputs of the collaborative research which has been conducted from 2017.
On July 4th 2019, DMSN SBM ITB held the workshop “Pemanfaatan Platform Digital Untuk UMKM”, invited 30 UMKM owners who have various businesses, from food, restaurant, and hotel. For the first agenda, Dini Turi Panam alamanda, MSM,. MCE. introduced the technical aspect of how to utilize the social media and digital marketplace to bring down potential customers to the purchase transaction. We picked the case on Instagram and three biggest marketplace in Indonesia, Tokopedia, Bukaplapak, and shopee. In the session, we explained the technical aspect and also the advantage, disadvantage and typical character of the platforms.
In the second session, Dr. Santi Novani explained how to utilize the facility that they already have, Platform Digital Pariwisata, Pantai Selatan Jawa Barat. By utilizing this platform UMKM owners will get the exposure to the wider tourist as their potential customer. They can put all the information about their business and put contact information on how to order their product or services. All audiences were so active in asking lots of questions in regards to the marketing and digital platform strategy.
After 3 hours of interactive presentation, the workshop was closed by on the spot trial on filling the businesses detailed information into the Pantai Selatan digital platform website. After the workshop, the information was directly published and can be accessed through the website.
In the process, audiences expressed the excitement to implement the strategy and were very keen to have continuous collaboration in the future. Their enthusiasm on the topic were expressed through their various opinions and requests. For example, the owner of Sambal Seafood Tjap Nelajan business expressed “can you please do this kind of workshop again, but at least for 3 days, because we really need all these skills that you shared, and we want to learn deeply…”.
The positive response did not only come from the audience, but also from Government partner in collaboration, Disbudpar Jawa Barat. They appreciated the initiative. Finally, because of this positive feedback, we are even more excited to continue delivering the program in the future, within a broader context and scope.
