“Placer’s insights into our event attendance and attendees has impacted our city in so many ways. We market events more efficiently than ever before, see clear ways to better serve our residents, and have helped our partners land multiple grants to help put on the Christmas City event. Placer has been a wonderful asset to the Office of Tourism and our community partners.”

~ Cristina Binkley, Tourism & Economic Initiatives Coordinator

The Challenge

A citywide event that was successful but not well understood

Known as “Arizona’s Christmas City,” the City of Prescott, Arizona loves the holiday, which it celebrates with weekly programming during 6 weeks from Thanksgiving to Martin Luther King Jr. day.  Tasked with understanding and maximizing the impacts of all Christmas events is Cristina Binkley, the Tourism & Economic Initiatives Coordinator for the city. While the events have always been a success, the city and the numerous non-profits wanted to quantify attendance and determine the impact it had on the city in order to request grants and raise funds. Until recently, the Christmas City organizers were simply taking pictures of the crowds and making assumptions about turnout.

The city’s Office of Tourism knew there was a better way.

The Solution

Shortly after Cristina joined the Office of Tourism, the city began working with Placer, enabling Cristina to take a deep dive into city programming using data and analytics. She explored the Christmas event season by comparing attendance of local visitors with visitors from over 90 miles away, who were more likely to stay overnight in nearby hotels.

Using Placer, Cristina looked at event progression year-over-year to 2017. The 2021-2022 event had 300k visitors over the 6 week period, 90k of which were tourists.

Cristina identified where tourists were coming from and how their attendance compared to local visitors, including the event’s most popular time of day and how long they stayed for the event.

Learn more about Metrics‍

Another part of the visit analysis Cristina performed used Placer to map the home locations of attendees, highlighting cities with the largest attendance.

Learn more about True Trade Area‍

The Outcome

Using the Placer data from Cristina’s research, the city’s economist created an economic impact report that showed surprising results:
Total economic impact: $52M
Visitor spending: $35M
Directly and indirectly supports 563 full time jobs
City tax revenue: $1.1M

While the city’s Office of Tourism knew the events were a success, they were now able to prove it and thoroughly quantify the impact with Placer and the economic impact report. The combined assessment showed that both the visitor and economic reach was far beyond what was anticipated.

SUCCESS: $200k in new grants and validation of marketing spend

The new insights Cristina and the City of Prescott’s Office of Tourism gained from using Placer to evaluate this event created tangible benefits for the city and the partnering organizations:

The visit traffic by day helped them connect better with residents. There were complaints on social media about vehicle traffic and overcrowding for some of the larger events. The consistent visits over the 6 weeks suggested they could advertise the event as a whole, rather than the specific dates of bigger events to reduce overcrowding on higher attendance days without impacting overall attendance.
Placer helped organizers validate that their marketing was working. Cristina showed the Placer attendance data to one of the key event (the New Year’s Eve “Boot Drop” event) organizers. Having consistently advertised to specific zip codes, the Boot Drop organizers were finally able to confirm that their efforts were working by identifying the number of visitors from these areas.

The economic impact report using the Placer data helped the city’s Chamber of Commerce secure $200k in grants in less than a year, including a $150k grant from AOT (the Arizona Office of Tourism).

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