Search "restaurant week resources" and most of what comes back is written for restaurants: how to train staff, how to build a prix fixe menu, how to open your books. Helpful, but not for you. If you are the chamber, Main Street organization, or DMO running the week, your job is different. You recruit the restaurants, promote the event, get diners moving between tables, and prove it worked. This page gathers everything we have learned about that job, including what happened when three communities ran it for the first time.

The Problem Every Restaurant Week Organizer Has

Sarah Marion, Marketing Specialist for the Village of New Lenox, Illinois, described her restaurant week the way most organizers would if they were being honest. For years it was a flyer listing the deals, shared on social media, the village website, and the local paper. Then everyone hoped for the best. "There was really no concrete way of knowing how many people participated," she said.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. The event happens every year, restaurants take part, and nobody can say whether it worked. Which means nobody can tell the restaurants whether it worked either, and every year the recruiting call gets a little harder.

Everything below is about fixing that.

Planning Your Restaurant Week

Start here if this is your first week or your first time owning it. How to Set Up Your Restaurant Week (Step by Step) covers the timeline, how to recruit restaurants, what to ask of them, and what to have ready before you announce dates.

A few planning decisions that save headaches later:

• Pick a slow week. Restaurant weeks exist to fill tables that would otherwise sit empty. Late January, early March, and the stretch after Labor Day tend to work. New Lenox ran September 8 to 15.
• Decide the format early. Fixed price menus, a featured dish, or simply "show up and dine." Simpler formats get more restaurants to say yes.
• Collect restaurant info with a form in Proxi, not email. Open the collection form on your restaurant week map and send restaurants the link. Each one adds its own menu, hours, deal, and photo, and you approve it in one click and it lands on the map. Twenty-five restaurants emailing you PDFs is a week of your life.
• Let the restaurants fund the prize, and collect it in Proxi too. New Lenox asked each participating restaurant to donate a gift card in whatever amount it chose. They ended up with over $300 in a Dine New Lenox Grand Prize that cost the village nothing. If you would rather collect cash than gift cards, go to Earn, create a vendor fee package, and rename it "Restaurant Week Donation" with a few levels like $25, $50, and $100. Restaurants pay by card, the money goes straight to your bank account through Stripe, and you see who has contributed in the same dashboard as the map.

Building the Map and Directory

Diners need one place to see who is participating, what they are offering, and how to get there. Map Your Restaurant Week walks through building a branded restaurant week map with filters for cuisine, price, and dietary options, then embedding it on your website so it ranks for "[your town] restaurant week."

Roswell Inc, the economic development organization in Roswell, Georgia, is a good model for how the page around the map should work. Its Roswell Restaurant Weeks site explains the event in a few lines, invites visitors to register, and then shows the interactive map of all 59 participating restaurants midway down the page. People understand the value before they are asked for an email, and once they register the map is right there. A few days in, registrations had already passed 1,000.

For another example, see A Proxi-Powered Guide to Seattle Restaurant Week.

Getting Diners to More Than One Restaurant

This is where most restaurant weeks leave money on the table. People try one new spot and stop. A digital passport changes that by rewarding diners for checking in at multiple restaurants, with a prize for hitting a milestone.

Here is what that looked like in New Lenox. The village and chamber ran the 2026 week as a passport for the first time, with 25 restaurants. Every restaurant got a printed flyer for its window with a QR code to sign up, and a second QR code at the register for checking in. The grand prize went to whoever checked in at the most restaurants. The winner hit 12.

The numbers at the end of the week: 696 people signed up and 638 of them left a phone number. In a post-event survey, Beggar's Pizza counted an estimated 454 tickets tied to the promotion and reported "much more enthusiasm this year due to QR codes and the rewards." Gatto's reported a 15 to 20 percent revenue increase for the week and said the feedback from diners was that restaurant week was the reason they decided to try the place. JBD White Horse Inn sold 70 restaurant week menu items and had customers ask for them to stay on the regular menu.

For the first time, Sarah had numbers to send back to the restaurants. That is the thing a passport buys you.

Two guides cover the setup:

• How to Run a Restaurant Week Passport Challenge That Keeps Visitors Coming Back
• Creating a Restaurant Passport

And the full story: How New Lenox Restaurant Week Signed Up 696 Diners With Its First Digital Passport.

Promoting the Week

Your restaurants will not promote the event for you, at least not consistently. New Lenox started paid social ads a few weeks before launch so the signup list was already growing on day one, filmed short reels on location at several restaurants, and ran a Facebook event page. Sarah's one regret was that the full list of restaurants and deals went out as an afterthought. "Next year we should do this when we launch so people can see what they will get if they sign up."

Give your restaurants something easy:

• Printable posters and table tents with a QR code to the map or passport. Proxi generates these from your event. Rebecca Vecera at St. Johns Riverkeeper, who ran a 25-brewery passport across Florida, said she could tell which locations actually put up the posters and table tents by their check-in counts. The ones that left the coasters in a drawer got a fraction of the visits.
• A launch email and two reminder emails to your list, sent from the same place your contacts live.
• A text message on opening day. Texts get opened. Emails get scheduled for "later."
• A leaderboard if you are running a passport. Diners share their rank, and that is free promotion.

For the full playbook, see 12 Strategies to Market Your Passport Challenge.

The Gap Between Signups and Check-Ins (and How to Close It)

New Lenox hit one problem that every first-year passport hits. Plenty of people signed up and never checked in anywhere. Some of that was the restaurants. Shawna Casey, who owns the local Rosati's, said staff were not always clear on how check-in worked, so diners who showed up ready to participate did not get prompted. Sarah's advice for next year: "Make sure the restaurants understand the process for checking in, as well as make sure they inform all staff of the promotion."

The rest of the gap is fixable during the week. Everyone who registered and never checked in is already on your list, and most of them left a phone number. Proxi lets you filter passport participants by check-in count, so you can text only the people with zero check-ins. "You are signed up for Restaurant Week, here are this week's deals, and the grand prize goes to whoever checks in the most." The diners already out eating do not get nagged. The ones who meant to go get the nudge.

Working With Sponsors

A bank, a hospital system, or a local brewery will often fund the prize and the printing in exchange for logo placement on the map, the passport, and your emails. How to Turn Your Restaurant Week Into a Sponsorship Powerhouse covers how to package that offer and what to promise.

Reporting Results to Restaurants and Your Board

The week after matters as much as the week itself. Restaurants want to know whether it was worth it, and your board wants a number. If you ran a passport, you already have check-ins per restaurant, total participants, zip codes, and spend amounts if you asked for receipts. Download the data, build a one-page recap, and send it to every participating restaurant.

Roswell Inc uses exactly this to recruit. Every QR check-in generates data the organization can show restaurants: which locations are getting visits, how many people are actively checking in, how engagement builds over the event. When the next restaurant week rolls around, the pitch is a chart, not a promise.

New Lenox sent a survey instead, which is how it got the Beggar's Pizza and Gatto's numbers above. Either way, the recap is how you get restaurants to say yes again. See How to Create Event Report-Outs for a template.

Examples From Other Communities

• Roswell Restaurant Weeks 2026: 59 restaurants, 1,000 registrations in the first few days.
• New Lenox Restaurant Week: 25 restaurants, 696 signups, first digital year.
• Seattle Restaurant Week: a city-scale guide map.

Where to Start

If you have a restaurant week on the calendar, build the map first. It is the asset everything else points to. Then decide whether a passport fits this year or next. New Lenox did it in its first digital year with a flyer in every window and a $300 prize the restaurants paid for, and came out the other side with a baseline of 696, a contact list, and a survey from the restaurants saying what to fix. That is a very different place to start next year from than a flyer and a hope.

Everything above runs on Proxi, and restaurant weeks are the activation we see most often. If you want to compare notes on what has worked elsewhere, grab a time with us.