CASE STUDY: Winter Park Prosperity Scorecard
OVERVIEW
The Winter Park Chamber of Commerce (FL) produced the Winter Park Prosperity Scorecard, an online dashboard that tracks and measures key indicators of Winter Park’s economic strength.
Winter Park, FL population: 26,307
Winter Park Chamber membership: 750 businesses
Timeline: 6-9 months
Launched: March 2022
OPPORTUNITY
As communities across the country struggled in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, chambers of commerce played a crucial role in revitalizing local economies by providing essential support and resources. The Winter Park Chamber partnered with the city, forming an Economic Recovery Task Force to assess opportunities to revitalize the local economy.
SURVEY
The task force decided to conduct a survey of its residents in order to determine the most important factors contributing to Winter Park’s economic landscape.
In order to ensure that their efforts were representative of the entire community, the chamber consulted a wide array of stakeholders in addition to chamber members. Holding more than twenty presentations with diverse community groups, the chamber worked to build community awareness, confidence, and investment in the project.
To ensure thorough methodology and minimize bias, the chamber hired Janelle Zurich Analytics to provide specialized survey development and was supported by Rollins College in gathering and analyzing the survey data. Over the course of several months, they conducted interviews with 616 Winter Park residents on the most important factors to stimulate the city’s economic revitalization.
“We became aware of needs that we didn’t traditionally look at, like poverty and food insecurity,” says the chamber’s President/CEO, Betsy Gardner, IOM. “Afterward, we thought we needed to create a tool measuring total prosperity where everyone could plug in and see the factors that create prosperity.”
SCORECARD
Following the survey, the chamber conceived of the Winter Park Prosperity Scorecard—an online dashboard reflecting the key indicators of the community’s economic and regional health. Informed by the survey data, the scorecard would lay a framework for assessing and directing economic recovery efforts.
With data visualization provided by eImpact and Lightcast and funding by the Edyth Bush Charitable Foundation, the scorecard features traditional prosperity metrics such as employment, industry, workforce, and housing, as well as measures of sustainability and clean energy, specifically:
Public electric vehicle charging units
Percentage of city fleet that is electric
Breakdown of renewable/clean energy mix under city utility portfolio
Number of annual solar permits (residential and commercial)
Screenshot from Winter Park Prosperity Scorecard. Source: Winter Park Chamber of Commerce (FL)
ROLLOUT
The chamber developed a multichannel communications strategy—including digital, earned, and traditional media—to ensure both survey engagement as well as coverage for the scorecard’s eventual release.
More videos with the chamber’s partners are available here.
RESULTS
The Winter Park Prosperity Scorecard was a resounding success, shaping community conversations and chamber programming as the economy rebounded.
The Winter Park Chamber received positive media coverage, including articles in the Orlando Sentinel and The 32789, and TV and podcast features. The release of the scorecard was covered in an episode of the Talk of the Town podcast.
The Prosperity Scorecard website has tracked over 16,000 lifetime visits, with 316 unique users and 477 visits in Q1 of 2024 alone.
The survey highlighted diversity in decision-making as a key metric, which served as the foundation of Winter PAC, the chamber’s political committee formed in January 2024. Winter PAC’s first endorsed candidate was elected to the city commission three months later.
With members of the Winter Park City Commission stating their desire to partner with the chamber on several aligned tenets featured in the scorecard—especially sustainability—the chamber is pleased to continue leading the community conversation on economic resilience.