A local business owner needed to convince Ben & Jerry’s that local residents in Boone would frequent his shop. But he faced a challenge: On paper, Boone is sparsely populated, with many household incomes falling well below the state’s median.
Starting in November 2017, he began working with Carolina Demography to paint a more robust picture of the area.
We began by looking at data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other sources, which indicated that the high-level snapshot of the county didn’t paint a complete picture. Many county residents are students at Appalachian State University and the county receives steady, year-round stream of tourists. As a result, top-line demographic and socioeconomic data did not sufficiently capture the buying power of residents or the economic impact of tourists.
Our customized report, which detailed the true economic landscape of the area, convinced Ben & Jerry’s to award the franchise in Boone.
Local business owner
To detail the true economic landscape of an area's buying power
Dr. Michael Cline is the state demographer for North Carolina at the Office of State Budget and Management and has given us permission to re-post his content here. Each year, he publishes population estimates and projections for North Carolina and…
This piece was originally published on ObservableHQ. Evan Galloway is a research associate with the program on Health Workforec Research and Policy at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research. The Census Data API is an incredible resource…
As part of our work on the county attainment profiles with myFutureNC, we regularly identify new data sources and metrics that help answer questions we are hearing from local stakeholders. For example, we developed county-level opportunity youth metrics to provide…
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