During MeetDenmark 2018, GainingEdge, began a major project on legacy in collaboration with consultancy and partner Iceberg. The study involved desk research on fifty international associations and fifty destinations as well as interviews with twenty from each of the two groups.
In this video, GainingEdge Chairman Gary Grimmer talks about our understanding of legacy through the lens of the MeetDenmark Outreach Study. “There’s a lot of confusion in the world around legacy”, admits the Iceberg ambassador.
Some of the findings on the current global landscape were published last year in the MeetDenmark Outreach and Legacy Report. The document included a range of outreach activities categorised by legacy impact goals, and a select number of outreach case studies from around the world.
But the use of the word “outreach” alongside “legacy” illustrates another key discovery of the study, that there is still confusion across the industry around the precise meaning of “legacy”. Is legacy, for example, correctly considered to be the goal of influencing government policy in a particular direction, or rather the longer term outcomes that the shift in policy later makes happen?