Calculating Your Top
Economic Development Strategies

How does a community know what economic development strategies stand the best chance for success?

In his upcoming book Building Communities: 25 Strategies to Advance America, author and economic development practitioner Brian Cole outlines the 25 strategies that communities can engage to improve their economic condition and overall quality of life.

Should a community work to recruit new businesses? Do tourism strategies make sense? Should the community foster business strategies to add value to existing commodities and resources? Do growth industries such as energy development and telecommunications hold promise for your community?

Traditional economic development strategic planning approaches wrestle with these questions, but do not have an objective methodology to prioritize strategies. Using the traditional approach, strategies are selected by three primary methods: 1) what historically has been done, 2) considering national trends and statistics, and 3) pacifying the most influential voices in the community.

Sometimes the traditional approach works. Most times it does not. Building Communities changes this dynamic with a highly-sophisticated computer-based algorithm that aligns 85 key success factors with 25 strategies. That is, each and every economic development strategy has between four and 15 key success factors that work to either “rule in” or “rule out” the viability of the strategy.

Take, for example, a Downtown Development strategy. Communities that desire to improve their economic condition and overall quality of life by implementing a downtown development strategy must consider six key success factors. Key success factors are conditions or abilities that must be possessed by the community in order to succeed.
The six key success factors for a Downtown Development strategy include: 1) a recognizable central business district/downtown, 2) availability of discretionary local funding for marketing/events/building façade improvements, 3) a downtown development organization and staff, 4) effective implementation of a comprehensive program, 5) active engagement by downtown building and business owners, and 6) support from the local government.

Building Communities not only recognizes these key success factors, but also provides a weighting of each of the six in the computer-based algorithm. The most important factor, for example, a recognizable central business district/downtown, holds a 40 percent weight while active engagement by downtown building and business owners holds a 10 percent weight.

By tapping the collective knowledge of the expertise of a community itself, each of the 85 key success factors will be scored from a ‘4’ (community has a substantial comparative advantage) to a ‘0’ (community has a substantial comparative disadvantage). The Building Communities methodology then considers the relative comparative advantages for all 85 key success factors to generate a prioritized listing of all of the 25 strategies.
Each of the strategies are scored on a ‘0’ to ‘100’ point range. Strategies that score ‘85’ are always recommended for implementation while strategies scoring ‘70’ or higher are to be seriously considered by the community.

In short, the Building Communities methodology through the Strategy Selector tool delivers a very objective approach to identifying a community’s most viable strategies.
The Strategy Selector tool is one of three new tools described in the upcoming book, Building Communities.