Your place has a story.
Understand it. Amplify it. Leverage it. Change it.
Community Life • Outdoor Recreation • History • Culture • Parks • Trails • Wildlife • Conserved Lands
What’s special about your place? No matter where you live, you likely have a good sense of the things that enrich your life, make your surroundings worth exploring, and help your community feel like home. But it can be:
Difficult to identify what these things are really worth to your community and talk about their value.
Hard to leverage them to make an economic difference, create a new future or enhance the quality of life you enjoy.
Challenging to tell your own stories so others notice and want to join in.
Next to impossible to come together when there’s not a crisis.
Put Harbinger’s experience to work for you. For 30 years, we have worked as guides, partners and knowledge builders. Harbinger helps communities, regions and supporting organizations harness, protect and expand the power of their places. For good.
New Resource!
Download Harbinger’s new guide to conducting and using visitor and recreational research user research. This do-it-yourself guide was produced through a collaborative partnership with the Lower Susquehanna Heritage Greenway, Maine Coast Heritage Trust, Outdoor Recreation Council of British Columbia, and the Wisconsin Office of Outdoor Recreation
This is a tool to educate, support, build capacity, and encourage data collection, supporting communities and small-to-mid-sized outdoor recreation, heritage and conservation organizations to produce solid research and use it for good.
Register for Fall 2025 online courses
Our online courses cater to small towns, rural communities, and groups that promote local culture, conservation, education, trails, and public lands. They are flexible, affordable, and focused on results. Improve your skills, connect with others, and help your community and organization grow. Free professional learning credits are available. (Our courses provide a virtual experience similar to sitting around a table together.)
Work with Harbinger to:
Understand your place
Harbinger’s collaborative approach yields results your community trusts and supports using regional economic analysis, impact projections, visitor and resident surveys, outdoor recreation assessments, and peer area reviews.
tell your story
You know your story. Harbinger helps refine it and tell it through clear and compelling economic reports, advocacy support, “grassroots” destination branding and marketing, and travel and recreation websites.
WRITE A NEW CHAPTER
Harbinger works from the roots up to support lasting change through dialogue and community engagement, place-based education, collaborative decision making and action, and community economic development.
Keep your place real
You want your community to be a great place to live and visit. Harbinger’s approach blends assessments, the stakeholder-engaged “Geotourism” approach, custom guidance for trail towns and gateway communities, and targeted support for local businesses and organizations.
Snapshots from harbinger’s work
Working for Montana Agriculture: Economic Benefits of Conservation Easements for Montana’s Farms, Ranches and Communities report released. The idea for this report—produced by the Montana Association of Land Trusts, Natural Resources Conservation Service and Heart of the Rockies—was spawned by a cohort of Montana participants in our Tell the Economic Story of Your Trails and Conserved Lands Without Hiring an Economist course. Harbinger contributed an analysis of the economic impact of easements and was part of the project editorial team. Read more here.
Harbinger works with trail communities across Kansas. From January through April 2022, Harbinger guided participants from 16 Kansas communities through a 14-week program focused on trail user and visitor research, economic impact and community benefits analysis, and how to communicate using data. Harbinger is providing ongoing support for this Trail Champions Cohort, a program of the Sunflower Foundation, a Kansas-based health care foundation. Read more here.
Harbinger analysis shows battlefield tourism on the rise. Weeding out the influence of changes in visitor counting methods and time-bound events such as natural disasters and government shutdowns helped the American Battlefield Trust better understand actual visitation trends at National Park Service battlefield sites. Read more here.
Parks & Protected areas
Learn more about how Harbinger works with and for our treasured natural and heritage areas.
Place-based education
Learn more about Harbinger’s approach to education that works in, with, and for communities.