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More than 30,000 people have visited the Spark on the Circle downtown park since its launch in July to lounge, have a drink or sandwich and play games like chess, table tennis and foosball.
Downtown Indy Inc., the not-for-profit that helped organize and oversees the park on the southwest quadrant of Monument Circle, knows the number—but not because there’s an entry fee or even an entry gate that tracks attendance.
Instead, Downtown Indy uses Placer.ai, an artificial-intelligence-based software system that partners with a wide range of mobile apps companies to measure movement using anonymous phone-tracking software.
The temporary park, which will be open through Nov. 3, is a collaboration of the Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development, Downtown Indy Inc. and Big Car Collaborative, a not-for-profit art and design organization. The groups want to know how many people are using the park to help them make recommendations and decisions about the future of the Circle.
Placer.ai, a product of Santa Cruz, California-based Placer Labs Inc., tracks 25 million users per month by embedding its software development kit into hundreds of apps. Placer.ai aggregates and extrapolates the data to gather insights into visitor behavior. For most locations, visitation counts have a 3%-5% margin of error.
Downtown Indy CEO Taylor Schaffer told IBJ in July that foot-traffic data to Spark will help determine the success of the pop-up park, which the city’s Capital Improvement Board funded with $1 million. Because Placer.ai provides location data for all points in time since 2017, Downtown Indy can compare Spark information to the same periods in previous weeks, months and years.
The data shows that visits to the southwest quadrant of Monument Circle, from Spark’s soft opening on July 8 to Sept. 2, are 25% higher than in the same period last year.
“The underlying visitation data allows Downtown Indy Inc. and organizations like ours to cross-reference many other data points and sources—including census profiles, trade-area profiles, rankings, favorite places, real estate development, local events and much more—to better understand trends and consumer behavior,” Schaffer told IBJ in an email.
Downtown Indy Inc. has also been using Placer.ai to gauge attendance and overall impact at other events, including the Circle of Lights and Fourth Fest, which it staged on July 4 this year for the first time.•
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