The MVP of visitor engagement: How Visit York County reaches attendees before, during & after events

Overview

Visit York County is a sports-tourism-driven destination that welcomes thousands of athletes, families, and spectators each year. With dozens of concurrent events and limited staff resources, the team needed a more efficient and effective way to engage visitors without relying on time-intensive manual outreach. By integrating its Simpleview CMS-powered website with Playeasy sports tourism and event experience tools, the destination marketing organization (DMO) created a digital powerhouse that connects visitors to event discovery and local partner visibility both before they arrive and while they’re actively in-market.

SITUATION

Getting off the bench

Visit York County’s tourism economy is driven primarily by sports, accounting for roughly 95–98% of visitation, with events often running simultaneously across multiple venues.

Before the Granicus Destinations and Playeasy integration, visitor outreach relied heavily on tactics like staffed visitor tables, printed materials, and paid digital ads. While these efforts created some awareness, they were difficult to scale, costly to staff, and nearly impossible to measure. “We don’t even have enough staff to cover all of the events,” explained Jordan McCraw, director of sales for Visit York County. “There’s also no reliable way to measure who picked up brochures, whether a conversation led to action, and if recommendations resulted in business visits.”

Even without these concerns, McCraw explained, attendees have their head in the game long before they reach the sporting event. “All they care about is getting to the game on time … they’re not worried about stopping to talk to the DMO before they get into the gate.”

The team needed a mobile-first, staff-light solution that aligned with modern visitor behavior and produced measurable results. “Destinations need to give event organizers something participants will actually click on and engage with,” said Sean Flaherty, Co-Founder & Chairman of Playeasy, and CEO of Compass. “DMOs need to provide something valuable — not just before attendees get there, but also at the facilities and wherever else they show up in the market.”
 

SOLUTION

"Winning across the board"

As a Simpleview CMS customer, Visit York County onboarded the Playeasy integration to modernize its approach to sports tourism.

Visit York County’s website content (restaurants, attractions, blog posts, and listings) primarily served leisure travelers; sporting event attendees only encountered the DMO’s website content if they searched or stumbled upon the site on their own. “A lot of times the DMO sports department and the leisure department are two separate worlds that don’t work together,” explained Flaherty. “Granicus Destinations and Playeasy are enabling those teams to actually connect.”

With the rollout of Compass — Playeasy’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform — Visit York County extended its content directly into event websites, registration pages, venues, and onsite signage. Compass delivers real-time, location-aware recommendations to hotels, restaurants, attractions, and deals based on where the visitor is when they engage. “This is the next step in how to better serve local partners and the attendees that we bring in,” said McCraw. “You’re winning across the board.”

McCraw explained that he used to struggle to decide where to send visitors after they scanned a QR code because static pages or generic lists often didn’t match where the visitor actually was. With the Compass integration:

• The technology knows where the visitor is physically located.
• Recommendations are filtered by proximity (restaurants near the venue, hotels near the event, etc.).
• Content is prioritized based on relevance, not just popularity.

“We’re basically building a digital bridge together so the DMO can take all the curated content from its website and have it flow into Compass and the experiences on the event organizer sites,” said Flaherty. “Simpleview CMS is powering all of that content; the idea of extending your Simpleview CMS content out to third-party websites is now actually possible.”

The experience remains fully branded across all touchpoints to match the look and feel of the DMO’s site, ensuring trust and continued engagement. “If they click a link and it doesn’t look like the event site, they’re probably not going to trust it; Playeasy allows us to brand everything, so users know they’re in the right place,” said McCraw.

Finally, the Playeasy platform gave the DMO a digital marketplace for lead generation, while automatically syncing event leads and interest reports into Simpleview CRM — eliminating duplicate data entry and manual workflows. “That right there is a massive time saver,” said McCraw. “When you’re a one-man show, this platform really helps you do more of your job.”
 

RESULTS

The MVPs of visitor engagement

Visit York County gained clear visibility into how event attendees interact with the destination by shifting from staff-heavy, hard-to-measure tactics to an integrated digital engagement strategy.

The integration enabled the DMO to track AI interactions, widget impressions across event sites, and referrals sent to local partners. This means the team can now quantify visitor engagement, demonstrate value to local partners and funding stakeholders, and scale its impact across dozens of simultaneous events.

The results speak for themselves:

• More than 15,000 event attendees engaged with destination website content in the first 12 months.
• Compass recorded 54,900 views across event websites in a two-week period.
• 62 attendee questions were answered during just two event weekends.
• 7,000 referrals to local business partners were recorded.

In addition to the numerical results, McCraw reported that duplicate content entry was eliminated, cross-team alignment improved, and an immense amount of staff time was saved. “Even if you’re not a full sports destination town like we are, this integration is still a great tool to use because it puts the whole funnel of the tourism ecosystem together.”

For DMOs looking to Visit York County for sports tourism inspiration, the message is clear. “If you’re looking to engage high-intent visitors, the event audience is really right for the taking,” said Flaherty. “We see 50 times more conversions on event-based experiences than leisure-based experiences. What destinations like Visit York County are actually buying is visitor engagement and measurable impact, not our software.”