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By creating dedicated regional pages and populating them with Localintel reports and profiles, this economic development team gave website visitors a richer self-serve experience, improved consistency across regions, and avoided the cost and effort of manually producing a large library of content.
“We simply wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing for communities if it wasn’t for the Localintel platform.”
Margot Cathcart, CEO, RMED
Rural Manitoba Economic Development (RMED) helps communities across rural Manitoba communicate their strengths to investors, businesses and other stakeholders. A big part of that role is making sure information is consistent and comparable across regions, so communities of different sizes can be understood on equal terms. Cathcart described that as essential to helping rural communities become investment ready.
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To support that work, RMED created new regional pages on its website (view here: advanceruralmanitoba.ca/regional-profiles). These were not designed as generic marketing pages. They were built to give visitors direct access to a wider set of regional content: consultant-style PDF reports and interactive online profiles for each region.
Localintel’s role in this project was to provide that content.
Localintel is not a website builder. It is a content platform that turns trusted, up-to-date place-based data into ready-to-use reports, charts, maps, dashboards, stories, profiles and embeds, so teams can publish and respond faster without rebuilding materials from scratch. RMED built the regional pages on its own website, then used Localintel’s platform to select the reports and profiles it wanted to feature on those pages.
Before: one static PDF economic profile per region
Before using Localintel’s new platform, RMED prepared one economic profile for each region and made those profiles available on its website as PDFs. Michael Asante, RMED’s Research & Data Manager, said those original profiles were created manually in-house using Excel sheets, manually built charts, manual updates and multiple approval stages before publication. He described the process as time-consuming, vulnerable to inconsistency, and limited to a static PDF that users could only download from the website.
Producing that earlier set of regional profiles took significant effort. Asante said RMED created 10 regional profiles around 2022 and that the work took months. He also described the manual work involved in sourcing data, cleaning it, rebuilding charts, and managing spreadsheets where one mistake could affect multiple outputs.
What changed
RMED had already been using Localintel’s embedded web tools across its website. What attracted the organization to the new platform was the opportunity to add something more interactive and more automated on top of that foundation. Cathcart said RMED had always wanted something “more interactive” and “more automated.”
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With the new platform, RMED created dedicated web pages for each of its regions, then selected the Localintel content it wanted to feature on those pages. Asante explained that each region now has its own page with eight profiles covering topics such as workforce, quality of life, mobility and commuting, housing, economy, demographics and community. For each topic, visitors can either download a report or open a full interactive profile.
So the website pages are RMED’s. The reports and profiles available on those pages come from the Localintel platform. That is the core of the use case.
“Previously, because they were static, you can only come in and download the reports and go – but now you are able to play with the data, play with visualization, see trends and understand better how the data is for each of our regions.”
Michael Asante, Research & Data Manager, RMED
From a small set of static PDFs to a broader content library
The scale of the new model is very different from the old one.
Previously, RMED’s website offered one regional economic profile per region in PDF form. Now, RMED has dedicated regional pages where each region gets the same treatment across eight topic areas, and each topic is available in two formats: a downloadable PDF report and an online interactive profile. In practice, that meant RMED could publish 64 reports and 64 profiles across eight regions without manually creating each one from scratch.
Asante highlighted several benefits of this shift. He said he values the fact that the profiles update automatically as new data becomes available, which removes much of the manual updating burden. He also pointed to the consistency and quality of the visualizations, the better user experience, and the ability to compare regions across more topics than before, including workforce, quality of life, and mobility and commuting.
That aligns with RMED’s public launch messaging, which describes the portal as a modernization of its rural data infrastructure, replacing static regional profiles with interactive, automatically updating profiles, AI-supported reports and presentation-ready visualizations. RMED also said the platform helps rural leaders work with current, credible data while reducing workload and improving communication clarity.
Why consistency mattered so much
For RMED, consistency across regions was not optional. Cathcart said consistency is critical to RMED’s credibility because the organization cannot appear to be picking winners and losers based on who gets better information. She said the platform helps RMED provide the same level of quality across regions.
That is one of the strongest parts of the story. The platform did not just help RMED save time. It helped the organization deliver a more standardized and equitable regional content model,one that supports all of Manitoba’s economic regions with the same high-quality information. RMED’s launch materials make the same point, noting that all regions, regardless of size or capacity, can access the same information to plan for growth and make informed decisions.
“It’s saving us not just a little bit of time, it’s fundamentally defining the kind of work we can do.”
Margot Cathcart, CEO, RMED
A much faster publishing workflow and a much better cost equation
The other major difference is speed.
The older regional profile process took months to create 10 profiles. By contrast, once RMED had decided what it wanted to feature from the platform, Cathcart estimated that designing the new regional pages, adding the links and content, and checking everything took roughly a week of full-time effort with the web team.
That contrast is not perfectly apples-to-apples, because the old work involved manually producing the content itself, while the new workflow is about selecting and publishing content already available through the platform. But that is exactly the point. Instead of rebuilding every output manually, RMED could start from a ready-made content library and focus on choosing, publishing and using the materials that best support its audiences. That workflow matches Localintel’s broader product model: choose the location, select the content you need, then download, share or embed it.
Just as importantly, the new workflow changed the cost equation. RMED did not have to commission dozens of consultant-style reports, build custom interactive profiles from scratch, or dedicate months of internal staff time to producing and maintaining them manually. Localintel’s own positioning emphasizes that the platform helps public-sector teams reduce reliance on specialist tools and external consultants by giving non-technical staff a ready-to-use content library built on governed, fully sourced datasets.
Better for website visitors too
The new regional pages also improve the experience for RMED’s website users.
Instead of finding a single staticPDF, visitors can now explore a region through multiple topics and choose the format that suits them best. Some may want a downloadable report they can save or circulate. Others may prefer to open an interactive profile and explore the data online.
That makes the website more useful for investors, site selectors, communities and other stakeholders who want self-serve access to current regional intelligence. RMED’s launch announcement frames that value clearly: the portal is designed to help municipalities access, understand and communicate economic information more clearly and efficiently.
The result
RMED’s regional pages show how an organization can expand the amount of content on its website without manually creating every report and profile from scratch.
RMED built new regional pages on its website. Localintel supplied the reports and profiles RMED selected and added to those pages. The result is a richer self-serve experience for visitors, amore consistent way to present regional information, and a much more scalable content workflow for RMED’s team.
See what your team can publish in a week
Localintel turns trusted data about places into publish-ready reports, profiles, charts, maps, dashboards, stories and website embeds, so public-sector teams can communicate faster, stay consistent, and reduce reliance on specialist tools or outside support. That positioning is consistent with Localintel’s current product messaging and with RMED’s experience using the platform to scale regional website content.
