The Visitor Index Score framework is small on purpose. Seven weighted categories, one multiplier, four sub-criteria per category, scored on a single afternoon of fieldwork. Below is the whole thing, end to end, with the arithmetic shown.
The Visitor Index Score asks one question of a tourism town: where will the next defensible dollar go, and what will it move. Six years of fieldwork across forty-three towns converged on eight observable qualities that, between them, repeatedly explained a tourism outcome the others could not.
Seven of them are weighted on a 0 to 100 scale and summed into a raw composite. The eighth, Unique Hook, is applied as a multiplier on that sum, because indistinguishable Main Streets are penalized by the framework even when they grade well on the sub-categories. A pleasant town that could be any other pleasant town is, by the lights of this rubric, less interesting than a flawed town with one unrepeatable thing.
Each category is decomposed into four sub-criteria, each scored 0 to 100, and the category score is the simple mean of its sub-criteria. The Unique Hook multiplier ranges from 0.8x to 1.2x, with most towns landing in the 0.95 to 1.10 band. The sub-criteria are what the analyst sees in the field. The category scores are what a chamber director can argue about. The composite is what fits on the memo.
The framework is intended to be open. The corpus is open. The sub-criterion definitions are open. A town does not need CCD to use it. A town just needs honesty about how it scores today and discipline about which category it will move first.
| Letter | Category | Relative weight | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| W | Website & StoryOne mark, one tagline, one through-line across signage, digital, merch. | 15% | |
| B | Beds & LodgingInventory, occupancy, hours, language, friendliness of the desk. | 13% | |
| A | Anchor ActivityThe one thing that gets a visitor in the car, and the one that keeps them past noon. | 16% | |
| D | Downtown DensityStorefronts occupied, walkable blocks, evening hours kept, no dead zones. | 14% | |
| C | Community CapacityWho actually shows up to the meeting. Chamber, council, association, volunteers. | 15% | |
| S | Safety & CleanlinessCurb appeal, trash, sidewalks, lit corners, the handshake before the conversation. | 12% | |
| R | Reviews & ReputationLodging tax trend, repeat-visit revenue share, ratio of locally-owned to chain. | 15% | |
| U | Unique HookThe one unrepeatable thing. Multiplier, not summand. Range 0.8x to 1.2x. | 0.8x to 1.2x | |
| Weighted categories sum to 100%. U is then applied as a coefficient on the weighted total. | 100% | ||
The diagram below traces one slice of the calculation. Four sub-criteria become a Downtown Density category score of 91. Seven category scores are weighted and summed to a raw total. The Unique Hook coefficient of 1.18x lifts the raw to the visible composite of 84.6, the kind of number a council can carry into a budget meeting without flinching.
The composite is not a verdict. It is a position. Towns in the 80 to 89 band already have most of the levers and need to pick one or two to move; towns in the 70 to 79 band are usually under-investing in one specific category and the diagnostic shows which one. Towns above 90 have a different problem, which is preservation.
The most useful pattern, repeated across forty-three field studies, is to read the rubric not as a ranking but as a budget. The category two points below the composite is almost always where the next dollar goes. The category fifteen points below is usually structural and slow. The category fifteen points above is the asset to protect.
The rubric is meant to be revisable. A town that disagrees with its score is invited to argue back; the framework is small enough that the argument is constructive. The most productive disputes have so far been over the U coefficient, which is the most subjective number on the page and the one CCD intends to keep iterating on.
Browse the full corpus to see how a composite reads in context, or open the Stillwater report card for a worked example with marginalia.
Not every town gets a field report. The corpus is a corpus, not a directory, and the bar exists so that a reader can pick any one of the forty-three published reports and trust that the same questions were asked of each. Here is what a town must clear before it joins the cohort.
The town must have one creative city development that is identifiable in a sentence. Halloween in Anoka. Mountain biking in Bentonville. Trolls in Detroit Lakes. Without a clear anchor, the report has no spine and the SAR block has no Result line worth printing.
The Result line in the SAR block must carry a real dollar figure, a real visitor count, a real GBP number, or a real job count. Sourced inline. If no real number exists, the report does not run. We do not invent revenue.
The VIS framework above grades on seven plus one. If a town is so thinly documented that we cannot fill the Website, Brand, Anchor, Stay, and Return components from public sources, the report goes back to research rather than to production. Audited components (Downtown, Curb) may be left null when no site visit is possible.
At least six discrete photos of the town, its anchor, and its downtown, with descriptive alt text following the conventions in our media library. A case study with one stock photo is not a case study; it is a tweet.
Short reports run 1,000 to 1,400 words for origin or foundational cases. Standard reports run 1,800 to 2,400. Long-form anchor analyses run 2,800 to 3,200. Reports outside that band are returned for compression or expansion before they go live.
The report observes before it preaches. It uses real names, real numbers, and real sources. It does not punch down at the town. It does not invent quotes. It does not stack three parallel-structure bullet points where two sentences will do. The closer is prescriptive but humble.
A town that already exists in the corpus is rescored on the same cadence as new reports. Towns that have changed since their first publication are reissued with a dated “Updated” line, the original report preserved in the journal.
Towns that clear all seven gates land in the cohort. Towns that almost clear, but miss one, go into the journal as field notes rather than as case studies. The full reviewer checklist, including publish gates and banned phrasing, lives in the repository under _content/CASE_STUDY_REQUIREMENTS.md.