PROVIDENCE — The Providence Foundation, which has been administering civic CPR to Downcity for decades, has put still another jolt of electricity into the area.

Collaborating with nine other government and civic groups, the foundation has launched a marketing campaign to get people from Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts to come to the Downtown Improvement District to shop, dine and partake of the arts and entertainment.

A spiffy Web site set up for the campaign declares: “Live It Up! The best restaurants. The latest trends. The hottest shows. You’re in Downtown Providence.”

The $75,000 Live It Up! campaign consists of regional advertising plus promotional events aimed at acquainting or reacquainting commuters with the charms of the older part of downtown. While the foundation and Providence Place mall generally cooperate, the goal is to get people to sample the wares of merchants and restaurateurs south of the mall.

"It’s too soon to tell” whether the campaign, launched in early November, has coaxed more people into the district and drummed up more business, said Daniel A. Baudouin, executive director of the foundation. Alley O’Shea, assistant manager of American Apparel, a unisex apparel store at 159 Weybosset St., said her store has a difficult time competing with the mall.

“We see downtown shopping as a complement to the mall,” Baudouin insisted.

The campaign was among the projects discussed last night at the annual meeting of the foundation, at the Westin Hotel. The 32-year-old foundation is a consortium of 115 corporations and institutions of health and higher education that is devoted to municipal betterment.

From the post-Civil War era through the 1950s, the retail heart of Providence and the locale of many of its professional and service businesses was the area centered on Westminster Street. When the lure of suburbia proved too much for the stores and businesses to resist, the area suffered a long decline that left it depopulated and neglected in the 1970s, with litter swirling down its streets.

As part of a concerted revival effort encouraged by the foundation, the city applied a brand name, Downcity, to the old retail core bounded by Dorrance, Pine, Empire and Fountain streets. After years of related work, the Downtown Improvement District was born in 2004, with the foundation as the happy parent, when property owners agreed to pay a fee for extra cleaning and safety — and for marketing and promotion.

The first large-scale marketing and promotion campaign is now under way, with the goal of making the district a destination. The district boundaries, generally speaking, are Memorial Boulevard on the north, with a bulge that includes One Citizens Plaza; the Providence River on the east; Route 195 on the south; and Route 95 and Franklin Street on the west.

“We want people to feel as excited about downtown as we are,” said Joelle Crane, program manager for the foundation, who is overseeing the campaign. Asked what themes the foundation wants to drive home, Crane replied, “Inclusive. Urban. It’s fun. It’s fresh.”

Unique is another word, foundation staffers say. Many of the 48 stores in the improvement district are one of a kind or, if they are one of a group, they are the only one in Rhode Island. And the same goes for the eateries.

“They offer something different than a chain-store experience,” Baudouin said.

The sidewalks in the district nevertheless are not busy during most of the daytime and early evening.

“There may be a perception that it’s difficult to come downtown,” Crane said. “Obviously, if you want registers to ring,” the public must be told what is available and that it is easy to reach.

Parking remains a concern, Baudouin acknowledged, and he said the city needs more parking garages.

But he said the foundation is pleased with the city government’s mass upgrade of parking meters on the streets. The presence of working meters, he said, discourages commuters and others from hogging parking spaces for long periods of time and frees those spaces for short-term parkers who patronize stores.

And parking is cheap, he emphasized. The hourly charge is $1 and metered parking is free after 6 p.m. and on Saturdays and Sundays.

The Web site is the center of the campaign — www.providencedowntown.com — and allows viewers to link to lists of places to shop, dine and enjoy arts and entertainment. If someone is sufficiently enamored of downtown, they can find places to live, too.

The campaigners have printed 30,000 brochures with maps that are being distributed to commuters, tourists and others — the target market is a 30-mile radius of Providence — and have put their message on posters, refrigerator magnets, video boards in the new GTECH headquarters and in theater programs, theater ticket envelopes and the newsletters of downtown employers. They also have bought advertisements in newspapers, magazines and state government’s glossy Rhode Island Travel Guide.

They have considered advertising on beer coasters, shopping bags, the sides of buses, billboards and radio. Cost is a factor, given that the foundation does not enjoy a lavish budget, Baudouin said. Of the $75,000 budget for the period from March 2006 through March 2007, much was spent on startup costs such as the Web site and only $20,000 has been available for advertising.

For the year beginning this March, Baudouin said he hopes to have $50,000 to $75,000 to sustain the drive.

The foundation’s longterm strategies for downtown have produced results. In 1992, when the foundation co-sponsored the first of what became a series of downtown charettes, or planning sessions, with urbanist Andres Duany, there was 900,000 square feet of vacant space in the retail and office buildings of Downcity, according to Baudouin. Only 150,000 to 200,000 square feet is now vacant.

Looking only at vacant first-floor space, the vacancy rate in the improvement district, which is larger than Downcity, was 30 percent as recently as mid-2003. Now it is only 14 percent. The measure excludes the Arcade.

“We’ve got to bring it down more,” Baudouin said. Spaces on side streets and in small buildings can be expected to perk up now that the larger spaces on the avenues are active, Crane contended.

O’Shea, of American Apparel, which was closed for the summer because an adjacent building burned, is optimistic.

“I think the campaign is definitely working,” she said. One indication, she claimed, is that some retail tenants on Thayer Street on the East Side are considering relocating to downtown because of rent increases in their locations.

Said Crane, “So far we feel good about what we’re doing.”