Community Pride Isn't a Feel-Good Initiative. It's Your Tourism Strategy.
- Heidi Schlag
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
One hundred and two people registered for the third Heritage Tourism Conversation about fostering heritage tourism in small towns. That number matters to me not as a vanity metric, but as a signal: many people are facing similar questions in their work:
How do we get people to visit our small communities?
How do we get residents to care about those visitors?
How do the organizations tasked with managing heritage tourism even begin to work together when their budgets, borders, and mandates keep pulling them apart?
Small town aficionado Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer, the founder of Heidi Town Consulting, joined me for this important conversation. She has spent years road tripping across the country, noticing what communities take for granted about themselves. That experience, accumulated over nearly two decades, shapes both her speaking work around community pride and her current consulting practice, which focuses on tourism strategies and comprehensive plans for Colorado municipalities, with a specialization in rural communities. She's currently contracted to write 26 byway itineraries for Colorado Scenic and Historic Byways, a project that she describes as something like getting a history degree in Colorado.
Community pride is infrastructure.
Heidi's "Love Where You Live" presentation grew out of a pattern she started noticing on her road trips: people who live in genuinely remarkable places look at you with a blank stare when you tell them how cool their town is. "I would notice throughout my travels a ton of apathy everywhere I went," she said. "I love your town. Your town is so cool. And they just kind of look at you, this blank stare."
Her goal isn't to manufacture enthusiasm -- She wants to give people an aha moment. The most powerful example she uses is her own husband, who grew up in Colorado and takes the perpetual sunshine for granted, while she, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest where clear days were rare, never does. People have a tendency to not notice the things they've always had, and Heidi is aiming to change that.
Community support is essential to the economic case for heritage tourism, and DMOs are increasingly recognizing that their communities are the product. The frontline workers, shopkeepers, restaurant hosts, and business owners who make a casual recommendation with real passion are all an integral part of the visitor experience in a way that no marketing budget can replicate.
Heidi described a model she often shares with communities: Durango, Colorado's ambassador program, which trains frontline workers to know what the region has, including museums, parks, and small sites, so they can send visitors there with confidence. That kind of local knowledge does more for a destination than a lot of the content we spend weeks producing.
"Tourism" is shooting itself in the foot
One of the ideas Heidi and I returned to throughout our conversation is deceptively simple: the word tourist can get in the way of the work.
In her consulting strategies, even when the document is formally titled a "tourism strategy," she intentionally replaces the word tourist with visitor throughout. "When you say visitor," she explained, "everyone understands that might be someone who's just coming to visit Grandma. But guess what? They're going to have an experience at the gas station. They may go out to eat, and they may actually go to the historic sites around town. They're going to have those experiences that a classic traditional tourist will have."
This matters especially in rural communities that don't see themselves as tourism destinations, and that may actively resist the label. In Colorado, where the pandemic sharpened a longstanding tension between mountain towns and the visitors overwhelming them, the word tourist had accumulated a lot of baggage. But every community, regardless of size or perceived "tourism appeal," has visitors, whether they are people who planned their vacation to your destination or families pulling off the highway to find a restroom and a bite for lunch. The work of heritage tourism is to make all visitor encounters matter, and that work becomes harder when the community isn't on the same page as the tourism office.
I've been working with DMOs and heritage organizations for years, and I hear versions of this same friction constantly. The word tourist can signal something extractive: people passing through, consuming, and leaving. The word visitor implies something more reciprocal, and that's actually closer to what we're building when we talk about sustainable heritage tourism. Language is a starting point, shaping how residents think about their own role in the visitor experience.
The visitor doesn't see your organizational chart
This is the tension at the center of almost every heritage tourism conversation I have. Visitors experience a place as a connected ecosystem, moving from one county into the next, from one DMO's jurisdiction into another, without thinking twice. They're following an interest, a landscape, an itinerary, or a story. We, on the other hand, are organized around borders and budgets that have nothing to do with the route they're driving.
Heidi described this dynamic playing out across Colorado's scenic byways. DMOs are often reluctant to invest in routes that might guide visitors into a neighboring county, because their hotel-tax revenue is tied to overnight stays within their own jurisdiction. She called it "a difficult subject," and it is. But she also pointed to Northern Colorado's collaborative model, a regional tourism summit where multiple DMOs from the area have come together to share resources, coordinate promotion, and, crucially, make friendships. "They've realized that people don't come here just to go to Estes Park or just to go to Fort Collins. They do multiple stops along the way." The recognition that the whole region is the destination unlocks something that individual organizations can't create on their own.
What the northern Colorado group has figured out is something I've been arguing for a while: collaboration isn't just good for the visitor; it also makes individual organizations more effective. When a DMO in Fort Collins can confidently send a gravel biker to the trails in Loveland 20 minutes up the road, knowing that those visitors are still returning at night to sleep in Fort Collins beds, everyone benefits. The visitor gets a better trip, the region gets a longer stay, and the organizations get a result that none of them could have produced by themselves.
Finding what makes each town different
We discussed how our consulting work often involves helping communities identify what actually distinguishes them, which is harder than it sounds when a dozen towns all have a shared regional history and a restored Main Street.
Our approach is boots on the ground: walking the streets, interviewing business owners, asking what has developed organically in this community over decades. The answer is almost always specific, and it's almost always something the community itself has stopped seeing.
Heidi's currently working with an agricultural community on Colorado's eastern plains that she discovered is one of the most successful ag communities in the region. Its signature event, Old Threshers Days, traces back to a farmer who found an antique thresher in his back forty and gathered his neighbors to see if it would still run. That's the origin story of a heritage event.
Her instinct with that kind of event is to walk carefully. There are still people alive who built it. "We want to grow it in a thoughtful way so that we're still giving respect to where it came from, what it means to that community's culture." That's a framing I've been using with my clients as well: heritage events are not just programming. They're living community memory, and the way we grow them matters as much as whether we grow them.
A quick word on AI
We touched on artificial intelligence at the end of our conversation, and it's worth repeating what I said on the webinar: I don't know how all of this shakes out. The apps emerging now can generate location-based stories pulled from an unattributed variety of online sources, which raises real questions for the small heritage organizations and towns who spent years building locally irreplaceable content.
Heidi made a point I think is important: she's writing 26 byway itineraries by hand, drawing on corridor management plans and direct interviews with local stakeholders, and she isn't letting AI write them, because quality and sourcing matter. That kind of specific, grounded, locally informed content is also, not coincidentally, exactly what AI search surfaces when visitors are planning ahead. Generic content is everywhere, and it is worth protecting the real thing.
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