Case Study: Show Me Grant County

For destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and convention & visitors bureaus (CVBs), one of the challenges goes beyond collecting data. It's turning that data into insights that inform strategic thinking and doing. Through our partnership with Grant County and BCS Management, we developed customized reporting tools that make performance easier to understand, communicate, and act on.

The Challenge

Like many destination marketing organizations, Grant County had valuable data spread across multiple systems. Website analytics lived in Google Analytics. Social media performance lived inside Meta Business Suite. Visitor movement data came from Placer.ai. Lodging performance was measured through Innkeeper's Tax reports. Each source answered part of the story. Leadership was asking important questions:

• Are we attracting the right visitors?

• Which marketing efforts are working?

• What drives overnight stays?

• How do we demonstrate value to stakeholders?

The challenge (and opportunity) was turning disconnected data into actionable intelligence.

Results at a Glance

✅ Unified analytics strategy

✅ Centralized reporting framework

✅ Executive dashboard for leadership

✅ Quarterly stakeholder impact reports

✅ Simplified KPI governance

✅ Analytics support through a major destination rebrand

Phase 1: Discovery and Strategy

Rather than jumping straight into dashboards, we started with discovery and strategy.

Working alongside CVB leadership, board members, marketing staff, and BCS Management, we facilitated a data strategy workshop focused on stakeholder alignment, business goals, KPI development, governance, reporting needs, and data inventory.

The result was a formal GCCVB Data Strategy Blueprint (v1.0) that established:

• A unified tourism data architecture

• A comprehensive data asset catalog

• Governance and stewardship responsibilities

• KPI definitions

• Reporting standards

• An implementation roadmap

This blueprint created a foundation that would allow future reporting to remain consistent, scalable, and aligned with organizational goals.

Phase 2: Executive Decision Support

With the strategy established, we designed and iterated on a monthly Director's Dashboard and Quarterly Reports. The objective was simple: If leadership only had five minutes to review performance, what information matters most?

We integrated visitor intelligence, lodging revenue, website analytics, social media performance, event activity, and demographic trends into a single executive reporting tool. The dashboard was designed to surface insights, identify risks, and support decision-making.

Leadership could now see relationships between:

• Digital engagement

• Website performance

• Visitor behavior

• Economic impact

Rather than asking, "How many website visitors did we have?" they could begin asking, "Are our marketing activities contributing to actual visitation and lodging growth?"

Image: on the left is a snippet from our recent strategic quarterly report designed for internal and external audiences (discussed in the below section); on the right is an internal dashboard with custom KPIs (discussed in above section). Notice the rebrand from June's dashboard to July's quarterly report.

Phase 3: Communicating Results

With the executive dashboard in place, the next step was helping the Grant County Convention & Visitors Bureau communicate its value to stakeholders outside the organization. We developed a quarterly Community Impact Report that transformed tourism, visitation, marketing, and lodging data into a clear, easy-to-understand narrative for board members, community partners, elected officials, and economic development leaders.

Rather than focusing on operational metrics, the reports connected tourism activity to outcomes. Visitor volume, lodging tax revenue, digital engagement, and demographic trends were presented alongside local initiatives, events, and future priorities that demonstrated tourism's broader economic impact.

The result was more than a report. It became a strategic communication tool that helped stakeholders understand what was happening and why it mattered. By translating analytics into stories, the CVB gained a repeatable way to build trust, strengthen partnerships, and communicate the value of tourism investment across Grant County.

Conclusion

Technology was not the outcome of this project. Clarity was.

Today, Grant County Convention & Visitors Bureau can connect marketing activity, visitor behavior, and economic impact into a single story that leadership, stakeholders, and community partners can understand and act on.

If you're leading marketing efforts for a CVB, DMO, or tourism organization, we'd love to talk about how you're using data to measure impact and guide strategic thinking and strategic doing. Contact us today.