City Nation Place is all about making connections and sharing learnings. However, many challenges don’t have one correct answer – which is why we invited our CNP Americas 2025 delegates to join one of three different roundtables to discuss shared challenges, what’s working, and – crucially – what isn’t.

However, the challenge is always deciding which conversation to join! If you didn’t have enough colleagues to cover multiple tables, we’ve got you covered. Our Expert partners were capturing key takeaways from each of the discussions; here are some quick highlights from the conversations.

What does it take to successfully leverage a core place narrative to deliver across the differing objectives of attracting visitors, meetings, talent, and investment?

While unified storytelling is crucial for places to attract audiences and dispel negative perceptions, it remains challenging to get a diverse group of stakeholders to tell a consistent and compelling place story. Identifying one organization to act as the ultimate lead or brand custodian can reduce conflict and ensure a single vision guides the strategy.

Ultimately, there has to be clear ownership in tandem with consistent buy-in from key stakeholders. Early and regular engagement is necessary to foster support and momentum and to safeguard against leadership changes.

Another challenge remains how local your place brand narrative should be. A strong, overarching place brand creates a framework that ensures the correct outcomes are achieved and that benefits are spread across a place, but it is also important to incorporate more hyper-local flavours. The challenge is to achieve this without creating a disjointed experience; you need a brand strategy that can be embraced by the full community across your place while still creating spaces to celebrate the diversity inherent within your place.

Place-led place shaping: How do you bring in all the voices who should have a say and still get things done?

Place shaping is vital to developing vibrant spaces and cultivating the long-term identity for your place. However, getting the community engaged before, during, and after your place shaping initiative or strategy is key to ensuring that you have buy in and that your investment aligns with the needs of the community.

To achieve this, you need to find the right voices to engage with and which can represent your community honestly. Taking a range of approaches to community engagement makes it easier to reach a diverse range of people and reducing the barrier to participation, whilst focus groups are valuable to digging deeper into specifically relevant topics.

By making sure that the community feels their contributions are appreciated and acted upon, they become active contributors in shaping their environments and are more likely to advocate for your work in the future.

Place-led data strategy and KPIs: How can collaboration deliver better data and a better understanding of what is working?

One common area to appear during the discussions was how organizations can cooperate to collect data across the place and the importance of fostering horizontal collaboration. However, you need a shared language between partners in place to develop a unified approach to KPIs. Be clear about what you mean by each KPI, what your targets are, and who’s delivering in which areas. Clearly articulating your goals and objectives helps you to focus on what data you really need to measure your impact.

We also need to rethink how we discuss data as an industry. If we can define an industry standard regarding how we use data, it will make comparison easier and facilitate interoperability between places looking to collaborate together. For example, should we publish total number of visitors or unique visitors?

Finally, you also have to be very targeted in what it is that you’re measuring – are you actually demonstrating impact, or are you just collecting vanity metrics? One suggestion was to drop metrics like event attendance, visits, and followers, and instead focus on more meaningful metrics such as expenditure, attribution, and movement within your place. There may also be an opportunity to adopt new KPIs, potentially aided by AI analysis to identify relationships between data sets more efficiently.

Interested in more learnings from the conference? Check out our highlights here!

Thank you to our roundtable hosts at Alphabet, Bellweather, CivicBrand, Crowdriff, DCI, Entro, Epsilon, Hunden Partners, Miles Partnership, MMGY, Propulso, Resonance, Rolecall, Simpleview (a Granicus company), TopRight, and Violet PR, with special thanks to the team at Entro, MMGY, Propulso, Resonance, and Rolecall for sharing their key takeaways with us.