How to measure a responsible visitor-economy campaign
For an under-traveled area, more visitors may be part of the answer. They are not the whole answer. A useful measurement plan asks where attention goes, who gets paid, what capacity is created, and whether local people still want the work to continue.
Start with the outcome, not the dashboard
Tourism campaigns often inherit a familiar set of measures: impressions, clicks, bookings, arrivals, and spend. Those numbers can matter, but they do not explain whether the campaign reached the right people, supported local work, or created pressure that the place did not want.
Before choosing the dashboard, agree what the campaign is meant to change. Is the goal to spread visits beyond one crowded site? Extend the season? Create paid commissions? Help people understand a local culture? Test a new visitor experience? Build a case for future public investment? Different outcomes need different evidence.
Five useful measurement areas
- Local value: who was paid, how much work was commissioned, which local businesses or cultural operators benefited, and whether money reached beyond the campaign supplier.
- Quality of participation: who shaped the work, whether local partners had decision-making power, what participants said about the experience, and whether the public invitation was clear.
- Distribution of attention: which neighbourhoods, operators, seasons, and experiences received interest. A campaign can be useful when it spreads attention, not only when it increases the total.
- Local capacity: what the place can now do that it could not do before. This might include a cultural map, a paid host network, an archive, stronger partnerships, or a repeatable programme format.
- Cultural continuity: whether the work helps local people keep making, gathering, teaching, hosting, or documenting culture on their own terms. This is slower than a campaign window, so it needs a follow-up conversation.
Ask the people doing the work
Some of the most important evidence will not appear in analytics. Ask artists, hosts, small businesses, community organisers, residents, and visitors what changed. Did the invitation make sense? Was the fee fair? Did the timing work? Did the project bring useful people into the room? Did anything become harder because of the attention?
These conversations should not be treated as a final testimonial request. Build them into the brief, pay for local expertise where appropriate, and give people a clear way to say that a project should change or stop.
Do not manufacture certainty
A new campaign will rarely prove that it caused every booking, investment decision, or local economic shift. Be precise about what the evidence shows. Report reach as reach, paid participation as paid participation, and learning as learning.
That honesty is commercially useful. It makes the next decision clearer. The team may choose to extend a programme, change the visitor route, fund an archive, invest in infrastructure, or decide that the idea is not right for the place. All of those are better outcomes than a polished report that cannot distinguish attention from value.
A campaign is responsible when the people closest to the place can see what the attention is for and where the value goes.
Need a measurement plan that fits the place?
Countercult can connect cultural research, campaign strategy, local commissions, visitor experience design, and evidence gathering.
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.