How Asheville, N.C. Fuels Community Conversations With Data
Vic Isley and her team are taking a new approach to working with stakeholders in Asheville, North Carolina. This past summer they hosted a two-day retreat, inviting neighborhood and business associations, municipalities, and other community groups into conversations about what’s happening in their Blue Ridge Mountain city.
Members of the airport authority, arts and neighborhood districts, national park service, and city and county staff all came to the table — and so did the data insights that Explore Asheville receives through its partnership with Zartico.
Asheville has a unique vibe. It’s equal parts Appalachian self-sufficiency and wide-open creativity. It certainly dances to the beat of a different drummer (which is fitting for a place with a weekly drum circle in its city center). This also means that the rapid growth of Asheville’s visitor economy is met with a wide spectrum of responses.
Bringing destination data into conversations about Asheville’s future has enabled meaningful discussions about balancing resident needs based on facts, not solely on emotion. Destination leaders are in the early stages of being able to answer questions that have historically created uncertainty and build a forum for continued stakeholder education.
Courtesy of ExploreAsheville.com
Finding ways for “more people to win through tourism”
Vic arrived in Asheville at the end of 2020 in the midst of an ongoing global pandemic. As the new president and CEO of Explore Asheville, she spent those early days in a mostly empty office, with only a handful of her new team members rotating through each day.
But Vic didn’t let these unusual (dare we say, unprecedented) circumstances deter her from studying the landscape of her new community. Well aware of residents’ mixed opinions about tourism but determined to do her own research, she launched a listening tour, setting up Zoom meetings and outdoor coffee dates with stakeholders and residents to better understand their perspectives on the local visitor economy.
“In doing my homework both during the interview process and then coming here, what I thought when looking at everything is that there’s a lot of opportunity for more people to win through tourism,” she says. “And just over two years later, I believe that even more wholeheartedly.”
Expanding the “win” means intentionally showcasing the community’s unique people, places, and culture — creating more seats at the table and more opportunities for new businesses.
“It’s not just shining the spotlight on the same characters, so to speak,” Vic says. “Because there’s lots of talent here.”
Deploying data to disarm
Sometimes directing the spotlight looks like building new content to welcome visitors to off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods. Other times it looks like connecting with community groups, keeping an ear open to listen for resident needs and using data as a starting point for productive conversations.
Bringing data to the conversation changes everything. It grounds the discussion in fact, rather than relying on conjecture, or what one of Vic’s board members termed “anec-data” — those anecdotal observations that sometimes get adopted as truth.
Vic likes to start her presentations with data from the get-go. Whether she’s talking to a neighborhood group, a business association, or a Rotary club, she begins by asking for a show of hands: Who in the room is an Asheville or Buncombe County native? Who was a visitor before they became a resident? And who is a visitor today?
This simple exercise melts away defensiveness and sets the stage for the data she is about to share with her audience. In a room full of professionals and entrepreneurs — where it’s not uncommon for 80% or more to report being visitors before becoming residents — it also demonstrates the power of visitation as a driving force of economic development.
Partnering with Zartico broadens the data stories that Asheville can tell. The ability to look beyond hotel performance helps to dispel the misconception that tourism leaders “only care about hotels.” And the data available in the ZDOS™ complements bi-annual surveys by harnessing the power of a large sample size with near real-time updates.
Ultimately, having a more holistic view of the visitor economy and its contribution to the community allows Explore Asheville to focus on the most impactful questions.
“I always ask, is the data interesting, or is it actionable?” Vic says. “Let’s focus on data that’s actionable.”
Courtesy of ExploreAsheville.com
Forging a path for destinations as community consultants
Vic and her team are just getting started. They’ve built an infrastructure to understand inputs and outputs, but Julia Simpson, Explore Asheville’s executive and strategy manager, says they have their sights set on understanding outcomes and measuring success against strategic objectives.
“It’s easy to default to saying, we put up X number of campaigns related to these neighborhoods, and then we saw an increase in clicks on those pages of the website,” she says. “But that’s just input/output. How do we say within a year that we saw with our Zartico data more movement to those areas? That’s what we actually want. That’s us fulfilling our objectives. The other pieces are steps along the way.”
Among the team’s early wins, Explore Asheville recently used Zartico data to analyze the impact of the organization’s Tourism Product Development Fund (TPDF), a community grant program that has used a portion of lodging tax revenues to fund capital projects such as greenways, sports fields, and museums for the past 20 years.
The analysis of geolocation data showed that while TPDF projects do attract visitors as intended, 35% of people observed at these sites are residents of Asheville, Buncombe County, or a neighboring county. And visitors who show up at TPDF sites are more likely to stay overnight and be observed at a local hotel.
The goal moving forward is to use this data to become consultants with the nonprofits and municipalities that lead these projects, helping them to better manage and market their projects, as well as to identify new project opportunities based on destination insights.
Zartico’s POV: 5 things we’ve learned
- Data is not a mic drop — it’s fuel for conversation. After data-heavy presentations, Vic will sometimes ask board members if the data matches up with what they see in the destination, using the data as a lens to discuss their observations, and conversely using observations as a lens to validate the data.
- Part of Vic’s approach includes taking a critical look at how Explore Asheville shows up in community conversations. “When can we be a partner at the table?” she says. “When are we a leader at the table? And when do we say, You know what? We don’t have a seat at this table, and maybe we shouldn’t have a seat at this table.”
- Progress can be found in embracing the “both/and” rather than the “either/or”, something Vic encounters frequently in Asheville. “It’s not ‘I’m right and you’re wrong,’” she says, “It’s that we have different perspectives. And if you can try not to run over it, but stop and talk about it, then that’s where you find commonalities.”
- Not all data comes from the ZDOS™. Asking a room full of artists about the share of sales that come from visitors, or understanding local restaurants’ staffing situations is a great way to bring audience data into the conversation.
- Nothing can beat regularly hearing from your residents — it’s the best way to align your values and collaborate on creating a stronger community.
Learn how to better communicate community-centered tourism goals and create stakeholder alignment — Watch our webinar, "Goal Setting & Accountability," on demand.
