How AI Improves DMO and Community Master Planning

Many DMOs are developing 10-year destination master plans to optimize their visitor economy in alignment with local community priorities. I've participated in producing dozens of them from Miami to Mesa. They often take as long as a year to complete because there's so much focus on community engagement in various formats: interviews, focus groups, town halls, surveys, visioning sessions, etc.

The tourism industry talks about the importance of community a LOT.

However, when you're working with a DMO, you never really dig into what actually moves the needle across so many endless community demands, not on a tactical and hyperlocal level. You're not really held accountable for any measure of success when it comes to community-specific initiatives, ranging from improving City Hall permitting processes for small businesses to tracking the movement of unhoused. A master plan needs to address those; the expectation is not really to fix them.

It's a whole different ballgame when you're developing a long-term strategic framework for a community organization like Near Southside, Inc. in Fort Worth. Success and being accountable for fixing things is expected.

Located at the periphery of the downtown core, Near Southside is the most interesting community in North America right now. The ex-industrial district can be loosely compared to Austin 20 years ago with the same cultural DNA and similar community values, based on a fiercely protective love for local, creative and independently owned small businesses.

That's under threat. In the last few years, as Near Southside evolved into the coolest 'hood east and west of the Pecos Line, real estate prices are rising commensurately. We all know how this story often ends with the encroachment of national brands sanitizing the soul of a place that made it attractive in the first place.

Near Southside is intent on rewriting that story.

AI Processes for Strategic Planning

Here's where AI comes in. Because of the multitude of overlapping challenges and evolving dynamics in the community, our team needs to crunch and debate a ton of qualitative and quantitative data. Addressing gentrification touches on so many aspects of how communities operate. Therefore, we are over-indexing on community engagement to get as many perspectives as possible to identify how the community best evolves in the face of rapid change.

The amount of inputs we're getting is substantive, and we want to inventory all of it as thoroughly as possible to build a super comprehensive knowledge base for the AI to cull through, connect dots and output insights.

Every individual zoom call with stakeholders is recorded with Granola AI, which produces full transcripts but the summaries are too light. So we created custom GPTs with instructions for everything we want in the summaries, including comprehensive overviews, key takeaways with detailed context for each, the most insightful quotes related to those takeaways, and all action items that stakeholders recommended. With the GPT, we can fire full transcripts into the chat, press "enter" and receive highly valuable, high quality and uniform summaries almost immediately.

We're doing the same with the focus groups but the custom GPTs require a different set of instructions. The two-hour transcripts capture the conversations with 10-20 stakeholders convened across specific industry and community segments. For those, the GPTs bucket corresponding high-level takeaways and tactical action items related to the same theme.

That has immeasurable value because these conversations are all over the place. It's great working with locals who are so passionate about where they live and how, but that means you're getting feedback from a firehose and someone taking notes doesn’t capture all the nuance.

Using custom GPTs to produce these summaries and populate takeaways is as good or better than any team could do manually.

Everything is stored in Airtable. Forget Google or Microsoft cloud platforms. Airtable is an AI-powered, relational database/spreadsheet beast for organizing data and automating basic workflows. The tables combine all project information in one place, such as a running list of pending/completed interviews and focus groups and their AI-generated summaries. Airtable can then auto-generate a summary of the summary in the same table for clients to easily review everything being collected on a daily basis to whatever degree they prefer.

Once you use Airtable, you'll never look at Google Drive the same way again.

I've never had so many insights so well organized, so thorough and so easy to share with a team and client to help inform each project phase. The client loves the transparency, immediacy and structure, naturally, versus waiting for the next weekly update to read a few bullet points in a PowerPoint.

Here's the thing. Because we've been so intentional about collecting such a high quality and comprehensive volume of feedback, we have a motherlode of a knowledge base for AI to work with. We can then enter all that in bulk into Google NotebookLM or ChatGPT/Claude Projects to pull out anything from high-level aggregate takeaways to anything super customized or tactical.

For example, the client was interested in hearing specifically just what developers had to say about gentrification. I wanted highlights related to anything discussed regarding City Hall processes. It’s super easy to pull reports together for those and anything else.

Ultimately, you can use AI to deliver an outline, a strategy map and a very rough draft of a destination master plan. All you need to do is combine all of the above together, plus PDFs of all relevant public and private planning documents, PDFs of all relevant case studies and best practices, and detailed instructions about the purpose, elements, structure, etc., of the plan.

People will disagree, sure.

I'm not dismissing the expertise of people who put these things together, because they bring deep context to every conversation and decision made during the development of a master plan. Everything happening now in Near Southside has happened somewhere else. When you can bring takeaways from those places to any present situation, it helps provide direction for everyone in the room.

Again, I’m not saying that AI is replacing humans. People get all kinds of worked up over that, especially in travel and tourism. I am saying you can create a better, more strategic and more informed master plan in a much more streamlined fashion when you employ AI strategically to better prepare a community for the future. That's just a fact.

I have four more community focus groups today in Near Southside. The expectation among everyone is that their contributions will make a demonstrable difference in their neighborhood. We can’t just speak to the challenges. We need to fix them and our processes with AI are giving everyone more confidence that we can deliver on that.

Wondering how many DMOs are interested in employing similar AI-first strategies to get a better handle on how to help their communities.