A dozen-year-long effort to attract more permanent residents to Tallahassee seems to be bearing fruit. The Choose Tallahassee campaign now has new data tools to determine its effectiveness.
One vital tool figures the economic impact when a typical family decides to call Tallahassee home. Choose Tallahassee Executive Director Gregg Patterson estimates the number of new residents so far this year to be nearly 1,700.
"We came up with a formula when people said, 'Yes, I moved here.' The average number of people in the house and average annual GDP we can now measure on an annual budget of less than $125,000, we're creating an annul GDP of at least $6.6 million plus."
Choose Tallahassee began with a single on-line guide to spark the interest of prospective new residents. But now there are five guides targeting different kinds of relocators. Patterson says the number of yearly visits to the sites now exceeds 90,000.
