You probably know or have lived this scenario - you need to develop a Destination Management Plan or a Visitor Strategy and you need data to understand what's been happening or to know where your destination has come from. If you work in destination management, data is the one area that we all know we need to do better and be better at collecting, tracking, analysing it and reporting on it. When we don’t measure, reflect and act, it’s difficult to tell a comprehensive story to inform stakeholders and build true advocacy and partnerships with them.

Discussions of whether or not one type of impact analysis - economic, social, or environmental - deserve precedence over the other are ill-founded and miss the fact that all three are necessary to inform good decision making and each other.

That said, economic analysis carries obvious advantages, being a robust way to weigh the impacts between different physical, financial, and subjective intangible effects for individual people, and then weight the balance of those effects between people. That dollars are only a convenient, but arbitrary, yardstick of relative preferences and therefore well-being is aside to the actual aims of economic analysis. Albeit one often poorly explained by economists, and therefore, commonly misunderstood by non-economists through no fault of their own.

Sparowly Group’s Senior Economist, Sam Miller provides a explainer to help demystify misperceptions.

The formalisation of data and algorithms has recently been the purview of computer science. And of course, the application of data and algorithms, in particular from the tech sector, has become essential to how we solve problems in our daily lives. We use data and algorithms to help us decide what movie to watch, or how to get directions in an unfamiliar city. But are there limits to the problems we can solve and decisions we can make by simply throwing an algorithm at a bunch of data? Sparrowly Group’s Ben Lever explores this.

As human-like and amazing as it is, is ChatGPT just another techno fad that will follow the same fate as the likes of Google Wave or Clubhouse? Or is it the beginning of a completely new paradigm in everyday life – a disruption akin to the launch of the iPhone? Sparrowly Group’s Ben Lever explores where the opportunities lie.

Program evaluation is a crucial component of many government interventions, initially designed as pilot programs. Evaluating the successes and failures of a pilot enables highly informed decisions to be made about the program, whether it continues and scales up or not. What do you need to consider to ensure program evaluation is truly objective? Sparrowly Group’s Federico Moreno explains.

Sparrowly Group’s Jackie Hicks and Avril Dunn share their top five practical marketing tips for businesses and how important it is to do it right to build customer relationships.

Whilst we all know that acquisition is far more costly than retention, it seems when it comes to retention, it is put into the too hard basket or seen as a low priority. Giovanna Lever shares her experience in this insightful blog important for businesses of all sizes.