What It Looks Like When a DMO Gets Heritage Tourism Right
Updated: Oct 20
Heritage Tourism Conversations, Episode 1 · Recorded live on Zoom June 22, 2026
Jake Wynn of Visit Frederick joined Heidi Schlag for the first Heritage Tourism Conversation to talk about how a destination marketing organization (DMO) can bring museums, historic sites, scenic byways, and local businesses together into one destination story. Frederick County, Maryland, is often held up as a best-practice example, and Jake walks through what makes it work, from the Frederick Historic Sites Consortium to the TRIPP grant program, along with practical advice for heritage organizations whose DMO isn't as focused on history.
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About the Guest
Jake Wynn is the senior marketing and communications manager at Visit Frederick, the destination marketing organization for Frederick County, Maryland, and a public historian who writes about local history at Wynning History. He came to tourism through the museum world, starting as a volunteer and intern with the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area while a student at Hood College and then spending eight years at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. That background on both sides of the field shapes how he thinks about heritage organizations as partners in the visitor experience.
What We Talked About
What a DMO can do for heritage organizations. A DMO is your local tourism office, and Visit Frederick works at the county level, supporting a tourism economy of about $560 million a year with a full-time team of seven. Even small organizations can tap DMO resources like a free events calendar (the most-used part of visitfrederick.org), marketing support, capacity building, and, in Frederick's case, the TRIP grant program, which has awarded millions of dollars over 20 years for marketing and new visitor experiences.
Think of your work as "product." Jake defines product as a visitor experience that doesn't exist yet but could. Visit Frederick worked with the volunteer-run Catoctin Furnace to build the Maryland Iron Festival, which now draws thousands of visitors every May. If your DMO isn't heritage-focused, there's strength in numbers: self-organize with other sites, create joint events, festivals, or itineraries, and present them to your DMO as something new visitors can experience.
Data matters, but so does listening. Frederick tracks visitor center intercepts, web and social analytics, cell phone location data, and zip codes collected by grant recipients. Jake's best ideas still come from listening to visitors, and the county's public art trail exists because people kept asking for a map that didn't exist. Heidi noted that heritage visitors rarely stop at just one place, which makes that whole connected journey hard to capture in numbers.
Hands-on, niche stories reach new audiences. Ghost tours that are "90% real history," craft-beverage partnerships, and hands-on classes like hearth cooking and historic printing all bring in people who aren't traditional museum-goers. Younger audiences are interested in history too, and they're often finding it through long-form YouTube content about how things were made and done.
Build America 250 projects to last. Frederick created a commemorative beer with Monocacy Brewing Company, 1776 double-decker bus tours, and an American History Fair. Jake's advice is to make everything repurposable, since a trail or itinerary branded for the 250th can be rebranded later, and the visitor awareness and search visibility you've built carries forward.
Document your stories so AI can find them. Visitors are increasingly planning trips with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Google's AI results. The specific, niche stories that only your organization can tell are exactly what those tools surface, so get them onto your website in your own words. Both Jake and Heidi cautioned that careless use of AI can quickly erode the trust heritage organizations depend on.
Join the Next Conversation
Heritage Tourism Conversations happen monthly on Zoom, and each one brings together people working in museums, DMOs, scenic byways, heritage areas, Main Streets, and outdoor recreation to learn from each other. Join my email list to get the invitation for upcoming conversations, and see what's coming up next on the Heritage Tourism Conversations page.
Full Transcript
This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.
Heidi Schlag: Thank you everybody for joining us today in this new experiment that I have launched. Some quick housekeeping — as I said, I'm going to try to keep an eye on folks as they enter the room. Please feel free to give us your name and where you're joining us from. And if you have any questions as we go, feel free to put those in the chat. Jake and I will talk for about 25 to 30 minutes and then we'll open it up to everybody on the call, because I really do want this to be a conversation, not a webinar where we're talking at you. I feel like heritage tourism is best when everybody is working together and can share their knowledge and their experience.
Heidi Schlag: Just quickly, I am Heidi. I'm a heritage tourism consultant and the owner of Heritage Tourism Studio. I work with museums, DMOs, heritage areas, scenic byways, Main Streets, arts organizations, and natural resources and outdoor recreation as well — helping all of those organizations connect to their visitors, but also to connect to each other in order to tell more meaningful stories of place.
Heidi Schlag: Today's session is the first in a four-part series I'm doing over the course of the summer, and most of you have registered for all four, which I'm very grateful for. If you haven't, I'll be sending out information about the other upcoming three presentations, and I would love for you to sign up to join us, or to tell friends and colleagues if you find these conversations useful.
Heidi Schlag: I created this series out of some observations I've made over the past few months. I attended a museum conference, an outdoor recreation conference, and a Main Streets conference. And I have a lot of conversations with people working in DMOs and scenic byways and heritage areas through my consulting practice. I noticed that everybody in the sector is really talking about the same issues and the same challenges — whether that's telling authentic stories, creating strong visitor experiences, building partnerships, doing more with limited staffs and budgets, reaching new audiences, and AI — how AI is changing our industry at a rapid pace.
Heidi Schlag: So I found myself wishing that all of these sectors that focus on heritage tourism could get in a room and talk to each other, as a way to share our knowledge and our ideas. That is why I've created this Heritage Tourism Conversations series. As I said, I don't want it to be a lecture series. I don't have all the answers, Jake doesn't have all the answers, and there are so many people out there doing really creative and collaborative work, and I want this to be a platform where we can all learn from each other.
Heidi Schlag: Hopefully you'll find this helpful, but I'd love to hear from you how we can make them more helpful. I'll be sending out a survey afterwards and I'd love your feedback — what you'd like to see us talk about in the future, topics that are on your mind, challenges. I'd love to bring on guests who can talk about really cool projects they've done. So if you're working on something cool, let me know.
Heidi Schlag: With that said — let me make sure there's nobody in the waiting room. It looks like we're good. I'm going to introduce our guest. Jake Wynn is a good friend of mine as well as a colleague. He's the senior marketing manager for Visit Frederick in Maryland, which is where both of us live, and he has a lot of experience in the museum world and telling wonderful stories as a public historian on his site wynninghistory.com. Jake, thank you so much for being my first guest. I'd love it if you could get us started — first, anything I missed in your bio that you want to highlight, and then, for folks who may not know this term DMO, would you tell us what a DMO is and what you do on a daily basis at Visit Frederick?
Jake Wynn: Absolutely. I think you nailed the bio. DMO — it's a Destination Marketing Organization, and DMOs are essentially your local tourism office. They can be organized at different levels: at a city level, or — for Visit Frederick — at the county level. So we represent all of Frederick city, our largest community of about 80,000-plus residents, but we also represent the entirety of Frederick County, Maryland with coming up on 300,000 residents, a rapidly growing community. DMOs are out there supporting local tourism initiatives, supporting local businesses that cater to visitors and tourists experiencing your local destination — and increasingly, and this will probably come up in the conversation, also serving residents. That's a very big discussion in the tourism marketing space: not only marketing to visitors but also supporting and finding ways to work within local communities.
Jake Wynn: For me, I'm the senior marketing and communications manager for Visit Frederick. My role is to support our efforts around the website, visitfrederick.org — our chief marketing tool, which gets over 3 million visitors a year, with our calendar of events and other promotional information — as well as trying to tell the story of Frederick, Maryland. We also publish a visitor guide, which I'm involved in. We have a full-time team of seven at the moment, supporting and promoting a tourism economy worth about $560 million a year to Frederick County's economy. So we're working with the businesses, nonprofits, museums, and outdoor organizations supporting those visitors. In a nutshell that's what I do — we're a small organization, so I wear many hats, which I'm sure is not dissimilar to many of you on this call.
Heidi Schlag: Absolutely. One of the things that makes you so well suited to the job, Jake, is that you came from a museum background. You're also a history lover, so you really understand this concept of heritage tourism because you've been in multiple sectors — and not all of us have had the opportunity to see the field from multiple points of view. Could you talk about how your background enables you to do your job as you look at heritage tourism, cultural tourism, and outdoor recreation in promoting Frederick?
Jake Wynn: My career trajectory, which was not at all intentional — I didn't know tourism was an industry when I first arrived in Frederick to go to a small liberal arts school, Hood College. I learned about it through an internship with our local heritage area — shout out to Liz Shatto and the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area for giving me an opportunity as a volunteer, then an intern. She was located inside the Frederick Visitors Center where I'm sitting now, working alongside the Tourism Council of Frederick County, now Visit Frederick. I learned heritage tourism on the ground. Then I transitioned to working at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine for eight years, one of our larger museums in Frederick County. So I grew into the knowledge of both sides of this world and learned some valuable lessons.
Jake Wynn: From the museum side, about the often-times lack of resources museums have available — especially financially — small staffs, and big missions, like we had at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, and trying to satisfy that. And then seeing it from the tourism side, where historical organizations, parks, and museums fit into the larger tourism piece. When I got hired at Visit Frederick after leaving the museum, our executive director, John Fieseler, was like, "we have more than history here in Frederick County." It's all the other things I love about being a resident — our great wineries, breweries, distilleries (which have their own fascinating history), our great arts organizations, and the amazing merchants and business owners who have their own stories. The underlying piece is storytelling, which is what we're all doing. That's what marketing is — telling a story that resonates with a potential visitor, hooking them to get in the door, and making sure they walk away having had an experience they're going to remember.
Heidi Schlag: Let's talk about that. How do you, as the DMO — I think of you as the convener, the umbrella over all of these organizations who each hold a small piece of what is Frederick's story — how do you help those organizations? I often call them subject matter experts, because they have very deep knowledge in just one particular piece of the destination story. How have you and your colleagues worked to pull all of those pieces together into a cohesive story?
Jake Wynn: In that regard, I'm very fortunate to have come into a pretty well-worn track of promoting history in Frederick County. History has always been, and continues to be, the number one reason cited by visitors for why they're coming to Frederick — we track that among the thousands of visitors who arrive at the Frederick Visitors Center every year. Coming into that, I learned through pre-existing relationships and organizations. The most important, thinking of umbrellas, is the Frederick Historic Sites Consortium — a group of all the museums, historic sites, and parks; anybody in that space can participate. We meet multiple times a year, do tours together, especially out to new experiences and exhibit openings, and promote events together.
Jake Wynn: One partnership between Visit Frederick and the Historic Sites Consortium is the Museums by Candlelight event, every second Saturday of December — we had about 26 participating sites and organizations in 2025 — open for free, with special programming and special hours. It really is an amazing visitor experience, as well as an experience for local residents, to come out and learn the heritage and history here, do something hands-on. It's great for kids and families. So across a cross-section of ways we communicate and collaborate, we've built the historical and cultural organizations and experiences into the overall visitor experience. We view our historical, cultural, arts, and outdoor organizations as the real, authentic keepers of these stories — those are the places where visitors are going to have the experiences they'll remember.
Heidi Schlag: I saw — and I've been meaning to send you an email to compliment you, and I haven't — that you just released your scenic byways booklet and website a couple of months ago, which is a great way to help visitors explore the area. Can you talk about that development process and the results you've been seeing so far?
Jake Wynn: Absolutely. We published this earlier this year — a scenic byways guide to Frederick County, Maryland. We're fortunate to have five scenic byways — two nationally recognized — and several state byways that pass through. Using some grant money going back to COVID, we developed it as a local road-trip guide. We wanted it available for visitors coming from all over the country and the world to explore our scenic byways and have an authentic road-trip experience, but it's also for residents. We're a very rapidly growing community, one of the fastest-growing in Maryland, so we're getting a lot of new residents. As part of our strategic plan for the next five years, we're working to engage local residents more, because they're ultimately the ones benefiting from all of this. We want to show our local residents the benefits of tourism — the benefits that visitors and their dollars bring into our community — and the best way to show them is to show them the experiences visitors are having.
Jake Wynn: It shows that our community is a great place to have a great meal, a great historical experience, and a great place to live. It's really about quality of life. This scenic byways guide is a great opportunity for residents to explore the back roads of Frederick County, to experience these smaller organizations, lesser-known stories, and smaller communities. We have great Main Street communities, and the guide gives them an itinerary, some ideas for ways to package these experiences and have a great weekend road trip — especially at a time when people aren't necessarily going to be flying long distances this summer because of jet fuel prices. So we've pivoted to pitch more of this local road trip, more mid-Atlantic experiences you can have without going too far, and still have a very rich, deep, authentic experience in a destination like Frederick County.
Heidi Schlag: I love that you've shifted your focus to the community. When I work with a lot of museums and other local organizations, especially smaller ones, they may not be equipped to welcome a ton of tourists. They aren't the Mount Vernons and Monticellos that can handle volume, so they often don't see the connection to tourism, because their bread and butter comes from the community. Can you speak to the various ways that, as a DMO, you're able to help these smaller organizations publicize themselves both to tourists and to the community?
Jake Wynn: This is something we're always re-educating about — what resources Visit Frederick has available — and it's the same for DMOs across the country. The local tourism office is going to have resources available even for smaller organizations, like an events calendar. It's the most-used part of our website. Tens of thousands of visitors every weekend are accessing it, and they're not just visitors — when we look at events-calendar usage by geography, most users on a weekend are in our community or directly adjacent. That means our residents are using this resource too. We have a free events calendar — anybody in the community can add an event if it's something a visitor can experience and falls into pre-existing categories we've created to keep it focused.
Jake Wynn: Another thing we provide is capacity building. In my almost five years with Visit Frederick, we've worked with historical organizations who want to grow — to build capacity, knowledge, and professionalism in their marketing and advertising to market new product. For us, "product" is those visitor experiences that don't exist right now but could exist in the future. One great partnership was with Catoctin Furnace, an incredible story of iron-making going back to the American Revolution — the furnace went into blast 250 years ago this year, supporting the American Revolution. It also tells the story of the enslaved workers in that furnace. We worked with this small, volunteer-run organization to develop the Maryland Iron Festival, now one of our most popular events every May, where thousands of visitors come from across the region for things like a live iron pour, art, local craft beverages, and kids' activities. That didn't exist four or five years ago — it was built slowly over time by working with that organization to create that product.
Jake Wynn: Something unique to Frederick — a chief way we support nonprofits and government agencies — is a grant program called TRIP: Tourism Reinvestment in Production, Product, and Promotion. This program has given out millions of dollars over its 20 years to organizations like Catoctin Furnace and other nonprofits and government agencies, to support marketing and advertising and the development of new product for visitors to experience.
Heidi Schlag: I love that Frederick does that, because so many small organizations just don't have the funding. They have great ideas and great stories to tell, but not necessarily the funding to pull together that type of event. But one thing you and I have both heard over and over is that Frederick is sort of the best-practice DMO — one that works with all its partners and can tell a really compelling story of the destination. For the people on this call who may not have that type of DMO, for a variety of reasons, what do you suggest are other ways they can start telling their stories and collaborating with their partners?
Jake Wynn: In lieu of having an organization like the Frederick Historic Sites Consortium, the best way — especially for heritage organizations, museums, and smaller sites that may not get the ear of their DMO, or whose DMO may not be as interested in heritage tourism as we are in Frederick — is that there's force in numbers. You can self-organize and work together as a group: create events or festivals together, find ways to get onto the radar of your DMO. The creation of "product," and thinking of it as product, and marketing yourself to your DMO as something new that visitors can experience.
Jake Wynn: Other things you can do — some of our organizations have done this — is create itineraries. Think of the visitors and create something: it could be a pamphlet or brochure, but printing is expensive, so use the internet and social media to make that accessible to visitors and residents. It's about thinking a little creatively. A lot of organizations don't have a lot of money — I lived that on the museum side. When I was at the Civil War Medicine museum, we did a lot of partnerships with local businesses: we worked with craft-beverage purveyors, made a whiskey, a brandy, multiple beers in my time there, and worked with local restaurants to create a Civil War history-lovers dinner. So thinking outside the box, creating something new, ideally something a visitor can experience, is a way to get onto the radar of your DMO and show them that historic and heritage organizations have real value as visitor amenities and should be promoted as such.
Heidi Schlag: I'd love to open it up to the room now. If you have questions for Jake or myself, or comments about what we've been discussing, please put them in the chat. Cheryl says, "Sharing market research about what travelers want also helps," and she mentions the U.S. Travel sentiment survey and Miles Partnership. That's a great point. Jake, can you talk about the research you guys use? I know you're always tracking visitor interest and sentiment.
Jake Wynn: Absolutely. We track a number of analytics and look at traveler sentiment. We collect data here at the visitor center — about 20,000 visitors a year walk through the door — and ask them where they're coming from, why they came, what they're planning to do, and how they heard about Frederick. But those are skewed somewhat, because visitor centers tend to be used by an older clientele; younger people often get their information online and use a visitor center as a bathroom. So we're also looking online — at our social media analytics; we just hired a part-time social media manager — to see what resonates with people and what stories and content are resonating, and how we can branch out beyond social media to reach more people.
Jake Wynn: We look at our web traffic — I'm looking at our website every day, updating things, seeing what areas people are engaging with, what they're interested in, how they're getting onto the website, and what content we can create to engage them. There are also other tools DMOs often use — we have a tool that looks at cell-phone data and the ability to track the metadata of visitors, seeing where they're going geographically within the destination. We're trying to pull as much information as we can, because it all helps guide our decision-making. Sometimes it's pretty difficult to get that information, so you have to think creatively about how to patch different forms of information together to get a fuller picture of what visitors are looking for.
Heidi Schlag: That's one of the challenges surrounding heritage tourism — this concept that heritage tourists don't generally just visit one spot. They tend to visit multiple spots. They enjoy history, arts and culture; they're outdoor-rec people too — they like to take a hike or go bird watching, and then go to a local brewery or winery and grab a meal. When that's all one visitor journey, it's really hard to capture that data. I saw a museum recently say, "My DMO just asked us to start tracking visitors' zip codes," and she said it feels really icky. So how do you, as a DMO, first try to track a visitor over the length of their stay, and then help these smaller organizations provide you the information you need to effectively market both them and the destination as a whole?
Jake Wynn: The tracking of zip-code information is something we've built into our grant program. That's one of the best forms of data for us to show the success of our marketing as Visit Frederick, as well as the individual organizations we support with grant funds. We value those zip codes, and any visitor information collected at those sites actually benefits you in a grant application if you're tracking that data. We've incentivized the collection of that data through that program, and it helps us make decisions about where grant money should go, and it's another data point we can use holistically.
Jake Wynn: But I'll say — I love data, I love looking at and analyzing data, especially on the website side, and I'm in it every day. But there's no replacement for going and talking to real-life people. I spend time at the visitor center, with our visitor services team, just listening to their interactions, getting a feel for who the visitors are, what they're looking for, and the questions they're asking — and thinking about how we can provide information through the website or other means that might be useful, or whether there's something we might be missing. That's how we created a public art trail: people were asking, "is there a map of all the public art in Frederick?" and it didn't exist, so we filled that hole with product to satisfy that visitor interest.
Jake Wynn: As much as we all love numbers and data, there's something to be said for listening to visitors and their nuances. As Heidi mentioned, it's hard to track all those different kinds of experiences. We're all different, we all travel differently, we have different interests. And sometimes, especially in a world of AI, leaning into those niche topics can really benefit you — whether you're a DMO, a museum, or a historic site putting content online. AI is going to pick up on that niche content you're creating and give it to visitors who are increasingly using it as a tool. But I know that's probably a topic for another day.
Heidi Schlag: Let's put a pin in it, because we have a couple of questions in the chat, but if we have time I'd love to return to AI. Donnie asks: what are the best examples of living history experiences that have been successful in Frederick?
Jake Wynn: Living history experiences — there's one I adore, a long-standing program in Frederick County: the Spirits of the Furnace at Catoctin Furnace. It's a combination of living history with a bit of theater. What makes it so unique — it's in October, and it builds on the interest in ghost tours, but it's real history: the real stories of the people and places. Catoctin Furnace has done this in a number of ways — creating theater and living-history experiences on the landscape, integrating the stories of real people in the real places where they happened, among the ruins of the ironmaster's mansion and at the blast furnace, navigating through industrial terrain that still survives today — but doing it after dark, by lantern light, which adds a whole other level. That event always sells out super quickly.
Jake Wynn: We have other great organizations doing living history. We're home to the National Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton — they do living-history programming and work with school children to tell those stories, because there's a school component to Mother Seton's story and girls' education. They use local children to tell the stories of the kids who once went to school under Mother Seton. Those are two examples — I really love what Catoctin Furnace does; I'd recommend checking out how they've broadened out and used living history in really interesting ways.
Heidi Schlag: It's a tremendous site; they do such a great job. Jacob asks: do you have any suggestions regarding connecting with visitors who are not necessarily traveling for heritage tourism specifically? Their community sees a lot of youth-sports visitors, and their local historic sites would like to better connect with non-heritage-tourism visitors.
Jake Wynn: That's a tricky one. It's that thinking-outside-the-box idea — I'd look at ways you can get people in who may not be a traditional history consumer. We did that at Civil War Medicine through creative partnerships with local businesses. Before my time there, the museum partnered with a local toy store, the Dancing Bear — there was engagement between the museum and the store to tell the story of historic toys and sell toys at the museum that dated back to the Civil War period. We also did ghost tours — and I'll admit this might spark some controversy depending on people's persuasion about all things paranormal — but we had arguably the most haunted building in Frederick, a site on the walking ghost tour, so we created our own ghost-tour program. I like to say it was 90% real history of Civil War medicine — which lent itself toward creepy, gross, and terrifying — and 10% the stories of staff and what we'd experienced in the museum. As one of those staff members who had some strange experiences, I could personally tell some spooky stories from that building after dark. That program often got people in the door who were not traditional museum-goers, and we could engage them with real history while satisfying that interest in the paranormal. We found that really successful as a way to bridge that gap to non-traditional historic-site visitors.
Heidi Schlag: This leads us to a conversation about Gen Z, Gen Alpha and their media preferences, and how they're discovering history and stories. I do hearth cooking at a local museum, and over the Christmas holiday I had two little girls, about 10 years old, who came up and said, "Oh, we know how to use that loom" — they pointed to a loom in the corner from the 1800s. I said, "How did you learn how to weave on a loom?" And they said, "On YouTube." It lit a light bulb for me that the younger generations are interested in history, but they're consuming it as long-form content on YouTube, TikTok, and other channels I'm not even aware of. Jake, have you seen that in your work? Has the DMO taken advantage of it in any way?
Jake Wynn: We created a whole new section of our website geared toward hands-on experiences and classes. This is very popular. Everything is about authenticity these days — very cliché, yet very true — people are looking for real experiences and the opportunity to meet real artisans, whether that's hearth cooking or the Frederick Book Arts Center, which does historical printing presses and the history of printing and art. There's a ton of interest. I can speak to this as one of those consumers of long-form YouTube content — I went down a rabbit hole about farming, and I'm very far from a farmer, but there's something about learning the craft, the art of doing something, everything that goes into it, that people really eat up.
Jake Wynn: It's leaning into that niche bit I mentioned earlier. If you can lean into something and tell its story with tremendous depth, and satisfy that urge people have to know how things work or how something was done, that's content that resonates on YouTube — and it can be product that resonates with real-life visitors. Through very engaging volunteers, like Heidi, or those at your local museums and historic sites who are passionate about their craft, creating experiences around that can resonate with those YouTube viewers.
Heidi Schlag: I want to talk briefly about the 250th. If anybody on the call wants to drop in the chat any collaborations you've been part of during this 250th year — I think this anniversary has lent itself well to organizations collaborating, creating different types of events or tourism product, tours, stories, books, all kinds of things that have grown out of the 250th. Jake, do you want to talk about how you've seen the 250th — not just in Frederick, but across the country — play out as hopefully growing this interest in history that will continue past 2026?
Jake Wynn: I'm hopeful that out of the unique challenges of the 250th — especially compared to the 200th anniversary — comes a lasting legacy. Here in Frederick, Catoctin Furnace, which I've been talking about, comes directly out of the Bicentennial; the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society comes directly out of interest from the Bicentennial. There was a lot of infrastructure and a lot of new ideas and organizations that spawned out of the Bicentennial in 1976 and the years that followed. What I'm hopeful for — because there were not a lot of resources available to any of us going into the 250th, so people really had to get creative — is that thinking outside the box, and that collaboration piece, is the legacy of 250.
Jake Wynn: Because the money wasn't available, people had to think creatively. We had to think creatively about how to market the 250th here, because we have some Revolutionary War history and incredible stories, but we're not Philadelphia, we're not Virginia. Virginia had many dollars to advertise and market their historical experiences tied to colonial America and the Revolution. So some cool partnerships have come out of it. We made a beer for Visit Frederick in partnership with Monocacy Brewing Company, which is also celebrating its 30th anniversary this year — a dual-legacy project. And I've been working with a vintage 1960s double-decker bus that does tours around Frederick — doing "1776" tours, 30-minute, relatively inexpensive bus tours that tell bite-sized pieces of Revolutionary War history. That's a partnership we created with Double Decker Bus and Visit Frederick. There have been partnerships like that throughout our community. Our community created an American History Fair, which has come under the umbrella of the Historic Sites Consortium — something that came out of 250, has been super popular, and I suspect will continue into the future.
Heidi Schlag: Cheryl says the New Jersey preservation conference last week had 400 people in attendance and a lot focused on the 250th, with the goal to keep people motivated to learn more — which goes to the point you just made, that hopefully a lot of what's come together for the 250th will continue into the future. And Jacob says they created an America 250 calendar on their DMO's website and a celebration trail of publicly accessible sites through Let's Rally. There's been a lot of that. I'm hoping to explore some of it in the coming weeks, just to see what people have been putting together — it really has been a great example of collaboration.
Jake Wynn: I'll add — something for all of us to keep in mind — is how can we repurpose all of this that's been created. We've all done a lot of work for the 250th; think about how we can repurpose that information, the events that have happened, the creation of an itinerary or a trail that may be branded as 250 for now but moving forward can be rebranded as something else. You've already created it in the visitor's mind, and created the SEO on a website. All of that can be used to your advantage moving forward into 2027 and further. And if you're a site or area with a lot of Revolutionary War history, America 250 goes on into the 1780s — so we're going to be doing this into the 2030s in some places. Thinking long-term about this — we were very mindful going into the 250th of how to create things that are going to be lasting, not just a fireworks display that detonates itself and is gone forever. We've tried to be mindful about that, not just for 250 but in everything we create — to not do one-time things that can't be repeated in some form or fashion.
Heidi Schlag: We have about 10 minutes. If anybody has any last questions, please put them in the chat. While you type, I want to circle back, Jake, to what you mentioned about niche content and AI. This is a loaded question, but in a few short minutes, can you sum up where you think AI is taking us in terms of travel as well as history and interpretation?
Jake Wynn: I'll say that I hate AI — but I use it every day, because it's a tool that's available to me, available to all of us, and visitors are using it. We're seeing an increasing rise in visitors using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini through Google. And if you go on Google, you'll see those AI search results whether you want them or not. So it's something we're going to have to learn to live with. One way you can use this to your advantage — whether you're a museum, an organization, or a DMO — is that people are looking for increasingly niche topics. We've been talking about this with the loom, hearth cooking, farming content on YouTube. If you have unique stories to your destination, or storytellers in your community who tell unique stories of place, what I'd recommend — and what we've been trying to do — is document that, put it into print form, and get it onto the website. Because ultimately you are feeding the AI monster this content.
Jake Wynn: But if you're creating that niche content, you're giving it to these search tools and AI tools that are going to spit that information back out to potential visitors. So if you can capture that place in AI search and get that information online, people are going to be able to find it, and you can capture some of that market and get people to your site or destination, because you owned that content. It also builds your credibility with Google. One thing Google does is build your credibility: if you have reputable information on your website — new content that's not just AI slop, real stories, real people, real places — you can use that to your advantage and get higher ratings and rankings in Google, which means more people find it, and it generates into the Gemini search as well. You get to own that content. This has been recommended to us through our website company, which creates websites for DMOs all over the world — this is the way of the future, at least for right now: to capture that AI market by creating that niche content and getting it onto your website.
Heidi Schlag: It's a topic we can't just cover in three minutes, so maybe we'll do another conversation just around that — there are so many other issues, especially with heritage organizations who are concerned about bias, hallucinations, incorrect facts, and having AI damage the trust of their institution. But it's also not going away. So having some really good conversations about how to manage risk and make it work as best we can for our organizations is warranted.
Jake Wynn: I'll say to that, too — it's very easy to do this in a way that creates divisiveness in your community or among your followers if you don't integrate AI well into what you do. We hear it all the time now, of organizations in our community creating posters and things using AI tools; people see it, and there's a backlash to AI that's happening — whether it's data centers in our communities, which we see all over the country, there's pushback, and pushback to the "sloppification" of everything. So I highly recommend being very cautious when using AI tools — not to overuse them, and to make sure the information you're sharing is accurate, not a hallucination, because it is very easy to lose trust among your audience in this era of AI slop being everywhere. It turns people off very quickly.
Heidi Schlag: We'll leave it there for today. I want to thank Jake so much for joining us and for all of your great insights, and everybody who joined us, for your questions and insights. My next conversation is on Thursday, July 16th. It's titled The Visitor Doesn't See Boundaries: Creating Connected Experiences, and we'll be talking to Wanda Maloney, who is an expert in scenic byways. She's going to discuss what a scenic byway is, for those who may not be aware, and how it can be used as a tourism asset along with trails and itineraries and some of the other devices we talked about today, in how you can utilize these to move visitors throughout your destination.
Heidi Schlag: On August 5th, we have Heidi Kerr-Schlaefer, who'll talk about heritage tourism in small communities. And Laura Scharle, on September 2nd, is going to talk about heritage tourism and the overlap with outdoor recreation. I hope you'll join us for those talks. Thanks again for joining us, and if you wouldn't mind filling out the survey when it hits your inbox and giving me feedback about how you'd like these to go and how they can be useful to you. Thanks again, everybody — and thank you, Jake.
Jake Wynn: Thank you all.
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