The challenge
Economic development is a content-heavy job. Websites have to stay current for investors and site selectors, business inquiries need answering, council briefings need preparing, and nearly all of it requires data that is credible, current, and in a form staff can use without specialist help.
For Red Deer County the bottleneck came down to two things. The website needed to give investors, site selectors and businesses the data they look for early in their research, the kind of information that decides whether they dig deeper. And content production leaned too heavily on outside help. An external group produced the County’s community profile annually, with a two-page snapshot also queued to commission.
Keeping investors and site selectors on the website
Localintel Dashboards are embedded across three pages of investrdcounty.ca.
On the Why Red Deer County page, the Logistics and Accessibility Advantages dashboard lets investors explore the road, rail, air and broadband networks connecting the County to markets, with drive times from key locations. Access to markets is one of the top site selection factors, and the dashboard surfaces it in a format visitors can explore at their own pace. Alongside it, the Quality of Life dashboard covers the livability data businesses weigh when they think about attracting and retaining talent.
The Data and Publications page carries the Community Profile dashboard, presenting economy, population, household data and workforce across six interactive views with dynamic maps and downloadable charts. The Labour Market page carries Workforce Advantages, giving businesses and site selectors educational attainment, industries of employment and occupations in a format built for that audience.
All of them draw from verified sources and update automatically. Localintel maintains the data behind them, so the team doesn’t have to.
Publishing stories in minutes
In Studio, the team has a growing library of ready-to-use stories they can select, edit and publish directly. Business Development Officer Tara Logan published the team’s first, “Red Deer County Builds on Trades Strength While Broadening Its Educational Mix,” within days of getting access. It needed minimal editing, and once the page was set up in the County’s website system, getting it live took under three minutes.
The team is now planning a regular cadence: a story each week, supplemented with their own County-specific content and coordinated with the communications department for social promotion.
Reports and profiles in-house
Studio also gives the team reports and interactive profiles covering the County’s economy, workforce, industry sectors and demographics.
Reports are publication-ready PDFs, structured and narrative-driven, ready to send to council, attach to a briefing or hand to an investor. Profiles are a different output, interactive online pages with dynamic charts, maps and key metrics that anyone can view via a shareable link with no account needed. A team member can send an investor or a council member a link to a polished, data-rich view of the community, the kind of thing that used to mean a commission and weeks of turnaround.
This is the capability that displaces the annual consulting spend.
“We’ve been commissioning a group to provide us with a community profile annually. We feel we have what we need in [Studio] to produce that ourselves.”
The result
A three-person team publishes more data-backed content than it did a year ago, keeps its investment website current without maintaining it, and has the capability in-house to produce the community profile it used to buy.
The work also keeps up with the data. Statistics Canada begins releasing 2026 Census results in November 2026, with subsequent releases running through December 2027. As each one lands, it flows through to the team’s reports, profiles, stories and dashboards automatically. When council asks what the latest census says about the County, the answer is already there.
The consultant was never the problem. The waiting was, and the annual gap between what the profile said and what was true by the time anyone read it.