Advocacy Is a Presentation Problem: What DI's Event Taught DMOs About Defending Their Funding
Destinations International brought destination leaders to Ottawa in late October for its Destination Impact event, and every session circled the same question: how does a destination organization prove its value to the people who fund and regulate it? Not to visitors, not to meeting planners, but to ministers, mayors, councils and trade officials. Destinations already have the data. What they are short on is a way to tell that story to audiences outside tourism, in rooms where nobody speaks tourism’s language.
That is a presentation problem, and the three days in Ottawa made a strong case that it is now one of the biggest presentation problems a DMO has.
Advocacy has become a core job, not a side project
For a long time the destination deck meant one thing: the convention sales pitch, or the visitor-facing campaign. The audience in Ottawa described a different reality. Destination leaders spend real time briefing legislators, presenting to city councils, defending hotel and tourist development tax structures, and building coalitions with chambers, economic development agencies and trade groups to do it. A legislative briefing, an annual stakeholder meeting and an economic impact report are each, functionally, a presentation to a skeptical audience that did not ask for it.
The event’s framing put advocacy alongside marketing and sales as a permanent function of the organization. The sessions were not about whether to do this work. They were about doing it well.
Lesson 1: meet decision-makers
inside their own priorities
The panel “Tourism Is Trade: Lessons from Canada for Destinations Everywhere” used Canada as a case study in positioning tourism as an export industry. The argument is simple and transferable. A visitor who spends money in a community is new money flowing in from outside, which is exactly what trade policy exists to encourage. Framed that way, tourism stops being a hospitality issue and becomes a jobs, investment, infrastructure and competitiveness issue, the things a federal minister already cares about.
The panel’s deeper point was about translation. The same tourism story has to be told differently depending on who is listening. Trade and export language works for a national government. Workforce and infrastructure land with a city council. Indigenous economic development and reconciliation matter to a different set of partners entirely. Panelists talked about tying the tourism narrative to priorities a decision-maker already holds, and adapting it to local politics rather than expecting the audience to adapt to tourism.
For anyone building the materials, that means one message with many tailored versions. A destination that briefs five different bodies in a quarter needs five decks that share a single set of facts and differ in emphasis, order and framing. Maintaining that by hand, in five separate files, is where the message starts to drift.
Lesson 2: funding defense
is an ongoing campaign
“Advocacy in Action: For the Large Destination” was built for DMOs with operating budgets above $10 million, and it used a live example. Frida Bahja, Ph.D., Director of Research at Experience Kissimmee, walked through Florida’s HB 7033, a bill proposing changes to how counties can use Tourist Development Taxes. The session covered executive strategy, coalition building, public policy engagement and cross-sector work, all through the lens of a campaign that was still moving.
The takeaway was not about Florida specifically. It was that the rules around a destination’s funding can shift quickly, and that large DMOs are treating funding defense as a continuous program rather than a one-time pitch when a bill appears. That changes what the materials have to do. A campaign needs content that can be updated as the legislation moves, sent to many stakeholders at different moments, and understood by people who will give it two minutes.
It also raises a question most advocacy teams cannot answer today: after the briefing goes out, who actually opened it, what did they read, and did they pass it along? When the audience is a legislator’s office, that is not vanity data. It is the difference between knowing a message landed and hoping it did.
Lesson 3: data needs a
story around it
Don Welsh, President and CEO of Destinations International, kept returning to storytelling, and specifically to how destinations turn research into a narrative that moves people. His point was that data alone does not win the room. The story built around it does.
What made this more than a platitude was who was presenting it. Research leaders were on stage in Ottawa, not just producing reports in the background. The people who build the economic impact numbers are increasingly the people asked to make those numbers land with non-tourism audiences. That is a new expectation for a research and marketing team, and it means the tools they use have to do more than export a chart. A table of visitor spending is an input. A council member understanding what that spending funded in their district is the output.
The setting made the same argument
It is worth noting how the hosts chose to present their own event. The welcome reception filled the glass Great Hall of the National Gallery of Canada, with Parliament Hill framed in the windows. The next evening, attendees walked from the hotel to Parliament for a projection-mapped experience of the building’s Gothic interiors: full-room light, motion video and surround sound.
Destinations sell experiences for a living, and they clearly expect the same standard from what they consume. Next to that, a static PDF attached to an email looks out of place. The industry’s own instincts about format are already correct. The gap is in the materials that go to funders and regulators, which tend to be the least experiential documents a destination produces.
What this means for destination presentations
Pulled together, the Ottawa sessions describe a specific set of requirements for advocacy materials. The story has to exist as one source of truth that can be reshaped for a minister, a council and a chamber without rebuilding it each time. The impact data has to be interactive and legible to someone outside tourism, so a reader can get to the number that matters to them instead of scanning a report. And the organization needs to know who engaged with the briefing and what they spent time on, because a campaign runs on that feedback.
This is the use case DIGIDECK was built around, applied to a new audience. A Master Deck Library holds the approved slides, data and brand once; audience-specific versions come from that single source rather than from copies. DIGIDECK Analytics shows who opened a briefing, which slides held their attention and whether it was forwarded, the signal an advocacy team cannot get from an attachment. Any destination team that wants to see what an economic impact briefing looks like in that format, built to go to a city council rather than a convention planner, can see it on their own content.
Frequently asked questions
Destination advocacy is the work a destination marketing organization does to make the case for tourism’s value to the people who fund and regulate it: legislators, city councils, trade and economic development officials, and community partners. It includes defending funding mechanisms such as hotel and tourist development taxes, building coalitions, and presenting economic impact data to non-tourism audiences.
“Tourism is trade” is a framing in which visitor spending is treated as an export: money that enters a community from outside, supporting jobs, investment and infrastructure. Positioning tourism this way connects it to priorities government decision-makers already hold, rather than presenting it as a hospitality or leisure issue.
HB 7033 was a Florida bill proposing changes to how counties can use Tourist Development Taxes, the funding source many Florida destination organizations depend on. At the Destinations International event in Ottawa it was used as a case study in how large DMOs run ongoing advocacy campaigns to defend their funding.
Because the audience is unfamiliar with tourism and short on time. A briefing to a legislator or council has to be tailored to that audience’s priorities, make the impact data easy to find and understand, and be easy to forward. Static reports and PDFs make all three harder, and give the sender no way to know whether the material was read.
By keeping a single approved library of slides, data and messaging and producing audience-specific versions from it, so a trade version for a minister and a workforce version for a council share the same facts and differ only in emphasis. Interactive presentation platforms such as DIGIDECK are designed for this; copying and editing separate files is where the message drifts.
Yes, if the briefing is sent as a trackable interactive presentation rather than an attachment. Engagement analytics show who opened it, how long they spent on each section and whether it was shared, which lets an advocacy team follow up on what actually landed.