What It Looks Like When a DMO Gets Heritage Tourism Right

If you've ever wondered what it looks like when heritage tourism is fully integrated into a destination's marketing strategy, the conversation I had with Jake Wynn of Visit Frederick offers an outstanding example.

Jake joined me for the first session of my Heritage Tourism Conversations series, and in about 30 minutes, he laid out a model that I think is worth studying no matter where you work or what sector you’re in.

Jake Wynn, Senior Marketing and Communications Manager at Visit Frederick, brings a perspective that's somewhat unique in destination marketing. Before joining Visit Frederick, he spent eight years at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, giving him firsthand experience with the opportunities and challenges heritage organizations face. That experience shapes how he approaches his work today. Rather than seeing museums, historic sites, and arts organizations as individual attractions, he recognizes them as essential pieces of Frederick's story and some of the destination's greatest assets. It's an approach that naturally places history, culture, and authentic local experiences at the center of Visit Frederick's marketing.

>> Watch my entire conversation with Jake on YouTube

It starts with storytelling

When I asked Jake what ties all of his work together, his answer was simple. “The underlying piece of all of this,” he said, “is the storytelling. It’s what marketing is. It’s about telling a story that resonates with a potential visitor -- getting them interested to walk through the door. And then ensuring they have an experience they’re going to remember.”

That framing is one I come back to constantly in my own work with heritage organizations. The question is never really ‘how do we market our site?’ It’s ‘what story are we telling, and why does it matter to someone who hasn’t heard it yet?’ The organizations that get this right think like communicators first and institutions second. The history, the artifacts, the expertise are the raw material. The story is the reason someone drives to visit you.

One of the things that makes Visit Frederick stand out is that it has built real infrastructure for collaboration. The Frederick Historic Sites Consortium brings together all of the county’s museums, historic sites, and parks several times a year to meet, tour new exhibits together, and co-produce events.

This group creates ongoing relationships and shared work, including their annual Museums by Candlelight, held every December, with 26 sites participating in 2025. Sites offer free admission, special programming, and extended hours. It’s both a visitor and a community experience at the same time.

Visit Frederick also runs the TRIPP grant program, which has invested $5.5 million over 20 years into local nonprofits and government agencies to support marketing and new product development. Jake described how they’ve used it to help Catoctin Furnace, a small volunteer-run organization, develop the Maryland Iron Festival, now one of the region’s most popular events, drawing thousands of visitors each May. “That’s something that didn’t exist five years ago,” Jake said. “That has slowly been built over time, and that’s working with that organization to create that product.”

What strikes me about this model is how intentional it is. Most destinations treat heritage organizations as a category to list in the visitor guide. Frederick treats them as partners in building a product. The difference shows up in everything from the events calendar to the TRIPP program: this is a DMO that has decided heritage is a competitive advantage, not just a checkbox.

What to do if you don’t have a Frederick-level DMO

I asked Jake directly: what do you tell heritage organizations whose DMOs aren’t as engaged? His advice was practical. “There is force in numbers,” he said. “You can self-organize and work together as a group — creating events together, finding ways to get onto the radar of your DMO.” He also recommended thinking of what you offer as “product” — a visitor experience that doesn’t exist yet but could. Showing your DMO something new and marketable gets you noticed in a way that a general ask for visibility usually doesn’t.

>> Need some guidance in creating tourism product with partner organizations? I can help!

He also pointed to the most underused resource most DMOs have: the events calendar. At Visit Frederick, it’s the most-visited section of the website, and the majority of weekend users are local residents. Any heritage organization can list events there for free, and those listings reach exactly the audience that needs to find them.

I’d add one more thing from my side of these conversations: document your wins. When you get onto the events calendar, track where your visitors are coming from. When you co-produce something with another organization, capture what worked. DMOs respond to evidence, and the organizations that can show visitor impact consistently get more attention over time. It’s a longer game, but it compounds.

Reaching visitors who aren’t “heritage tourists” yet

One of our audience members asked how to reach youth sports families and other non-heritage visitors, which is a question I hear consistently in my work with heritage organizations. Jake's resoponse: create something that meets people where they are. At the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, that meant a ghost tour that, as Jake put it, was “90% real history of Civil War medicine — which our story lent itself towards creepy and gross and terrifying — and then about 10% the stories of the staff and what we had experienced in the museum.” The result was a room full of people who had never thought of themselves as museum visitors. Spirits of the Furnace at Catoctin Furnace does something similar: lantern-lit living history tours that sell out every October.

The common thread in both is creating an entry point that doesn’t require someone to already love history. It invites them in through curiosity, atmosphere, or experience, and then the history takes over.

Niche content, YouTube, and what AI actually means for heritage organizations

We saved some of the most timely territory for the end. Jake had introduced the idea of “niche content” early in our conversation — the idea that deeply specific, well-documented content about your particular subject matter is actually a strategic advantage, especially now. He’s seen Visit Frederick build an entire section of their website around hands-on experiences and classes because visitor demand was there (it came up organically in visitor center conversations) and because that kind of content performs.

When we turned to AI, Jake was characteristically honest: “I hate AI, but I use it every day because it is a tool that’s available to me.” His strategic advice, though, was sharp. “If you have unique stories to your destination — document that, put it into print form, and get it onto the website. Because ultimately you are feeding the AI monster this content. But if you’re creating this niche content, you’re giving it to these AI tools that are going to be spitting that information back out to potential visitors.” In other words: your specificity is your defense and your advantage at the same time.

He was equally clear about the risk. “It is very easy to lose trust amongst your audience in this era of AI slop being everywhere. It turns people off very, very quickly.” For organizations whose credibility rests on accuracy and authentic stories, that’s not a small concern.

That trust point matters most for heritage organizations, in particular. Your credibility is your product. If visitors arrive expecting an expert-led, authentic experience and find generic content dressed up as local knowledge, you’ve broken something that’s very hard to repair. The organizations that hold that line -- that commit to documented, specific, locally irreplaceable content -- are also the ones best positioned when someone asks an AI assistant what to do in your destination. Your niche is your defense and your credibility at the same time.

Watch the full conversation

This is just a slice of what Jake and I covered. We also talked about the new Visit Frederick scenic byways guide, the resident-as-visitor shift that’s reshaping how DMOs think about their work, and how to actually track visitor behavior across a multi-stop heritage experience. You can watch the full session on YouTube.

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