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Ask ten municipalities how they use Localintel's content platform and you'll get ten different answers.
Some use it to ensure their community's strengths are communicated clearly to the businesses, investors, and site selectors who visit their website. Some use it to publish data-backed stories, or to respond to investor and council questions the same day they arrive. Others are rolling it out across multiple municipal departments so that planning, communications, and economic development staff all have access to the same current data.
The following is a snapshot of what that looks like in practice.
Keeping investment attraction webpages current
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The Town of Smithers in BC built its Why Invest in Smithers? page around platform content – from logistics and workforce to quality of life and available opportunities – giving site selectors a clear picture of the community before they've spoken to anyone on the team. The Why Haliburton Highlands' page draws on platform content to promote the county's demographics, strategic location, quality of life, and workforce profile – giving potential investors a clear picture of what the community offers. The Town of Gull Lake's Check the Advantages page uses platform content covering strategic location, workforce, and market demographics.
In each case, the team built the page. The platform keeps the underlying data current – updating automatically as new government figures are released, including 2026 Census data as each tranche lands through 2027.
Producing reports and profiles in-house
Red Deer County's Economic Development team used to commission their annual community profile from an outside group – expensive, and ready only on the consultant's timeline. Through the platform, they now produce it themselves, on demand, in-house. The Town of Vermilion in Alberta uses platform content in the same way, drawing on ready to share reports and profiles for communicating a broad range of data backed content about the town to council, businesses inquiries, and residents.
Reports are publication-ready PDFs built from verified data. Profiles are interactive and shareable by link, with no platform access required for the recipient.
Publishing data-backed stories
Teams draw on the platform's library of ready-to-use stories to produce content for websites, newsletters, and council communications – content that communicates what the numbers alone can't: what a community's workforce growth means for a manufacturer looking to hire, or what population trends say about where a community is heading. The bottleneck the platform removes is a familiar one. As Norfolk County Business Development Coordinator Blaire Sylvester described it:
"I haven't even posted too many stories or news articles on the website with data points because I just don't even have the time to collect them."
Once a story is published, the same underlying content can be adapted for a newsletter, a council briefing, or an investor follow-up without rebuilding from scratch each time.
Responding to questions the same day
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Norfolk County Director of Economic Development John Regan described a moment that captures what this looks like in practice: an investor asked a question, and the platform had a structured, sourced response ready to draw from immediately. "Essentially I copy and pasted, did very minor edits to it… and sent it off. And I couldn't do that before."
He calls the experience "literally like having an economic development analyst on staff, a virtual one."
Getting current data across the organization
Location data isn't only economic development's domain and some organizations are starting to treat it that way.
The Town of Stonewall and City of Brandon in Manitoba have recently come on board, with plans to roll out access across their economic development, planning and development, and communications teams – so that every department working with community data draws from the same source, rather than each one finding and interpreting figures independently.
Rural Manitoba Economic Development uses the platform across its regional operations, ensuring that communities throughout rural Manitoba, regardless of their size, have access to the same quality of data and content. As Margot Cathcart, CEO of RMED, put it:
"We simply wouldn't be able to do what we're doing for communities if it wasn't for the Localintel platform."
Where to start
Most organizations begin with the task that's most pressing: a report that's overdue, an investment attraction page that needs refreshing, or a council briefing that needs current figures. The platform supports all of them from the same underlying data layer.
To see what's available for your community and how other organizations in your region are using it, our team is happy to walk you through it.
Book a demo: www.localintel.com/demo
