Measuring Economic Impact

An important element of the work of National Heritage Areas is to draw in visitors to heritage sites, facilities, and other attractions. In 2005, five National Heritage Areas-Augusta Canal NHA in Georgia, the Delaware & Lehigh NHA and the Lackawanna Heritage Valley in Pennsylvania, and the Essex NHA in Massachusetts and the National Coal Heritage Area in West Virginia-participated in a study to assess the characteristics of the visitors to their sites and estimate the impact of these visitors on the local economies.

The study found that these five heritage areas alone attracted more than 5.5 million tourists in 2005. An estimated 68.3 million visitors visited the entire 27 National Heritage Areas in the same year. The impact of this tourism activity is clearly significant to the local economies of each region.

To download the study report, click here. Copies may be purchased for $1.50 per copy by e-mailing your name, mailing address and number of copies requested to John Cosgrove.

In 2003-04, seven national heritage areas contracted with Michigan State University to first develop a model to estimate the direct and indirect impacts of tourism in heritage areas. The heritage areas and MSU adapted an existing measurement tool called the Money Generation Model (MGM), which is used in national parks to measure visitor impacts, to quantify the regional impacts of heritage tourism in mixed urban/rural landscapes. Data was collected through visitor surveys and entered into a revised model (the MGM2), designed to estimate the number of jobs created and amount of new income generated within the region through tourism.

The 2004 summary report draws parallels among regions and makes recommendations about ways to more effectively measure the impacts of heritage areas on the regions they serve. To learn more about the pilot study and to download individual areas' reports, visit the Michigan State University website. A guide to the survey and analysis process is also available. To download the 2004 final summary report, click here.

Other initiatives to measure the impacts of heritage development, tourism and change in towns and cities include:

• Impact of Visitors to Historic Sites in the Hudson River Valley: A Marist-Greenway Survey of Visitors, Hudson River Valley, June 1997
• Southwestern Pennsylvania Historic Preservation Commission Survey
• Northern Forest Wealth Index: Exploring a Deeper Meaning of Wealth, Northern Forest Center, 2000
  
• Atlas of Social Indicators for the Upper Columbia River Basin, USDA Forest Service, USDI Bureau of Land Management, Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem management Project, 1995
• Quality of Life in Canada: A Citizens' Report Card, Canadian Policy Research Network, 2003
• Quality of Life in New Zealand's Eight Largest Cities, http://www.bigcities.govt.nz/
• Australia State of the Environment 2001 Report, http://www.deh.gov.au/soe/2001/
• Values and Heritage Conservation, Getty Conservation Institute, http://www.getty.edu/conservation
• Preservation Economic Impact Model 2.0 (measures total economic impacts of historic preservation), developed by the NPS National Center for Preservation Training and Technology (NCPTT) and Rutgers University.

Baseline data and indicators on the national heritage areas are available from the NPS National Heritage Areas website.