Innovative Community Engagement in the NY Adirondacks
Over the past several months, we’ve had the opportunity to share the concept of a Destination Promotion Community Index with many of you — on stage at DI events or in smaller task force settings.
We’ve been working with the folks at Zartico to identify and explore a set of indicators to measure, assess, and communicate the value of the work that destination organizations do for the communities they represent.
Together we’ve outlined the first five indicators, which you can read about in detail in this blog post:
- The importance of the visitor economy
- Tax revenues
- Economic opportunities and jobs
- Community amenities and quality of place
- Quantifying the negative impacts of tourism
As part of this work, the Zartico team is connecting these conceptual indicators with actual destinations that are approaching discussions about ROI and community engagement in innovative ways.
The Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism (ROOST) faces a challenging assignment — to promote and manage visitation to two and a half rural counties in the Adirondacks of northeastern New York.
The region leans heavily on its outdoor recreation offerings. Vast wilderness and woodlands are punctuated by small towns and hamlets with rich local histories. Living up to its decades-long reputation as a convenient getaway for nature-lovers — the Adirondacks are within a day’s drive of 25% of the North American population — ROOST emphasizes year-round offerings ranging from snowmobiling to swimming holes.
Download the report to learn how ROOST has developed creative avenues for:
- Direct engagement with residents and businesses through regional managers and sentiment surveys
- Sharing the “secret sauce” of data-led strategy through insight-packed stakeholder reports
- Celebrating the reinvestment of tax revenue through quality-of-place-building grants
- Supporting growing economic vibrancy through branding and long-range vision
- Soliciting candid feedback, then developing creative responses to negative impacts like crowding
Check back this summer for an update on ways destinations across the globe can put the destination promotion community index into action.
About the Author
Introduced to the world of destination organizations by a random internship application to Visit Baltimore (then known as Baltimore Area Convention & Visitors Association), Andreas Weissenborn began an unexpected career into hospitality that left him with a continued passion towards the tourism industry.
Weissenborn spent just short of 11 years with Visit Baltimore helping with its Research, Technology, and Information Systems across the organization. In 2017, he joined the Association on behalf of a Destinations International Foundation initiative to be a dedicated research source for Destinations International.
As part of his responsibilities, include supporting our core advocacy and research initiatives such as the community shared value, the tourism lexicon, the event impact calculator, and various reporting platforms, and our belief of destination promotion being a common good for the greater good.