FIG 01a / Field photo
Forty-three towns. Eight categories. One composite letter grade a mayor, a chamber director, or a downtown coordinator can put on a budget memo and defend. The point is not to crown winners. The point is to give a place the smallest, clearest map of where the next dollar should go, and to keep updating it, quietly, every week.
Each category can be observed in a single afternoon of fieldwork, and each one repeatedly explained a tourism outcome the others could not. The full weights and a worked example live on the method page.
The one unrepeatable thing. Applied as a multiplier on the composite, not summed.
One visual mark, one tagline, one through-line, repeated across signage, digital, and merch.
Storefronts occupied, walkable blocks, evening hours kept, no dead zones between anchor and parking.
Curb appeal, photographability, the handshake before the conversation. Trash, planters, sidewalks.
How easy it is to get there, park there, and find the next thing once there.
Lodging inventory, hours, restrooms, language, friendliness of the desk.
Who shows up to the meeting. Chamber, council, downtown association, volunteers.
Lodging tax, occupancy, repeat-visit revenue, ratio of locally-owned to chain.
The honest opening. CCD is a new practice. The towns linked below are research subjects from our published 43-town corpus, not finished CCD client engagements. We are showing each mechanism working in a real place readers can click through to verify, not selling a past client outcome. As cohort towns complete a first rescore and report back, named before-and-after numbers will replace the industry-range context on this page. We put what we can defend, and we name what we cannot.
These are the six community levers a town can move once the council, the chamber, the EDA, and the downtown association are reading the same graded document. Tourism is the largest or second-largest private employer in many of the counties we look at. A defensible diagnostic gives a town the shared language it needs to argue for the storefront, the sidewalk, the festival, or the brand.
A walkable, occupied downtown is the largest single driver of dwell time and repeat visits. Filling vacant ground-floor space pulls foot traffic to its neighbors, block by block.
Lodging tax is the most defensible measure of tourism impact because it lands as a monthly line item in the municipal budget. A higher composite VIS score correlates with occupancy and average daily rate, which the town keeps.
Repeat visitors spend more per trip and cost nothing to acquire. Curb appeal, evening hours, photographable moments, and small handshakes turn a one-time stop into a yearly tradition.
A published, named, ranked report is press-friendly. Reporters use lists; mayors share grades. A town with a clear story and a defensible letter is a free travel-section feature waiting to happen.
Most of the cost of town-level tourism work is friction between the chamber, the council, the EDA, and the downtown association. One shared graded document is a meeting-shortener.
State tourism grants, USDA Rural Development, EDA Public Works, and Main Street America funding all reward documented baseline assessments. A VIS report drops cleanly into a grant narrative as third-party diagnostic evidence.