Chloe Clary, a parks and recreation staff member, told the Mount Holly City Council on Monday that the city logged more than 14,000 visits to Mount Holly Nights this summer and averaged about 2,300 visitors per event.

Clary said the department used Placer AI, a location-data analytics platform that estimates visitation from anonymized cellphone app signals, to measure attendance, dwell time and visitors’ home locations. “They’re using cell phones to estimate how many people visit locations,” Clary said. “I cannot pinpoint a single person through any of this. Nothing identifiable is used.”

The presentation showed fireworks night had the lowest dwell time, while an October drone show produced the longest average visit duration. Clary said the platform also revealed demographic and market-segmentation patterns: median household income estimates ranged roughly from $73,000 to $82,000 across event nights, typical visitor age clustered in the mid-30s, and average persons per household was about 2.5.

Clary highlighted Experian Mosaic profiles produced from the data and said the top three visitor segments were “suburban style families, singles and starters, and thriving boomers,” information she said the city can use to tailor programming and marketing.

The data indicated that 5,170 of the summer’s attendees were residents — about 36% — and the remainder were visitors from outside Mount Holly. Clary noted examples of distant visitors, including 13 people recorded from a Stanwood, Michigan, ZIP code. She also said Placer can map visitors’ travel routes and compare Mount Holly’s events with other municipalities’ footprints.

“Some nights are historically higher; ramp it up,” Clary said of staffing and services, adding that insights can help set police, fire and event-staffing levels, restroom counts and vendor needs. The Tourism Development Authority (TDA) shares access to the Placer data, she said.

Council members thanked Clary for the presentation and asked about how Mount Holly compares to nearby towns. Clary replied that while event attendance is trending down nationally since the post-COVID peak, Mount Holly Nights is seeing growth and is “doing really well.”

Clary closed by offering to share the data and answer follow-up questions.