Explore Breda increases visitors by 33% with a data-driven content solution

Explore Breda is a dynamic, data-driven ecosystem that brings the city’s story to life and invites people to explore, connect, and get involved. With the right strategy, a flexible headless setup powered by Prepr, and the creative vision of Good News, Breda now has a future-proof platform that connects and inspires all who live, work, study, and visit the city.

To learn more about the Explore Breda project, listen to the full interview with Hildegard Assies and Chris van Persie on Emerce, where they discuss how the platform gave the city a strong digital identity and increased engagement by 33%.

For Hildegard Assies, Director of Breda Marketing, the core digital challenge was clear: “The challenge was to address not just residents and visitors, but also businesses and students, through our brand story and strategy.” While the city had previously considered these audiences, the ambition now was to broaden the platform’s scope, to create one cohesive digital destination that could serve multiple needs, across very different user journeys.

This raised a critical design question: “How do you build a platform that appeals to diverse audiences with distinct motivations, without fragmenting the experience or losing the user along the way?”

Traditional city platforms often segment audiences into rigid, separate landing pages, but Explore Breda wanted to break away from that outdated model. Someone could be an entrepreneur who lives in Breda, studies part-time, and enjoys going out in the city. Explore Breda wanted to reflect that real, layered experience of city life.

They aimed to create a smooth and unified platform where anyone could find what they need. At the same time, the team needed to keep the city’s identity strong and consistent, without overwhelming people with too much information.

This also meant thinking ahead. The platform had to be future-ready, able to grow and evolve with the city and its people. And it had to use data strategically to both inform and activate users, guiding them toward real engagement with everything Breda has to offer.

Since its launch, Explore Breda has proven the power of combining strategic design with data-driven technology. In just the first months, the platform attracted over 600,000 active users and achieved a 33% increase in visitor engagement compared to the previous year.

This growth reflects more than just traffic, it shows genuine activation. Users are not only discovering events, places, and opportunities in Breda, but also building their own itineraries, bookmarking favorites, and clicking through to local partners. During major events like BredaPhoto, for instance, 25% of the outbound traffic to their website came from Explore Breda, a clear indicator of the platform’s impact on the broader city ecosystem.

Behind the scenes, Prepr’s built-in personalization and data capabilities allow the team to analyze behavior, segment audiences, and continuously optimize content, without overwhelming users or compromising the brand story. Combined with Good News’ design strategy, this enables a smooth, tailored experience that supports both short-term goals and long-term vision.

Explore Breda is the official digital platform for the city of Breda, designed to inspire, inform, and activate a diverse range of users to discover and engage with everything the city offers. Acting as your personal city guide, it shows you the best places, events, and stories that make Breda special.

As the city’s central hub for information and inspiration, Explore Breda aims to create a single, dynamic digital platform that could engage and activate multiple distinct audiences with different needs and motivations, while telling Breda’s authentic city story.

To achieve this, Explore Breda partnered with Good News, a digital agency specializing in strategy and design, and Prepr, a flexible, headless content management system built for scalability and personalization. Together, they set out to build a platform that could grow and adapt over a decade, reflecting the evolving needs of the city and its audiences.

To bring this ambitious vision to life, Explore Breda partnered with Good News, a digital agency known for its strategic and creative approach. From the start, the team made a key architectural decision: to go headless.

As Chris van Persie, Project Manager at Good News, explains, “It gives us flexibility and future-proofing. You can easily integrate with other systems, and if in five or ten years the frontend needs a radical redesign, you can do that without touching the backend.”

To power this setup, they chose Prepr, a powerful headless CMS built for personalization and data-driven engagement. Prepr offers the flexibility needed to serve multiple audiences dynamically, while also providing built-in tools for content modeling, segmentation, and performance tracking, key elements for activating users and measuring impact.

Together, they build a platform that wasn’t just visually appealing, but also smart, scalable, and flexible enough to support the city’s long-term goals.

Good News focused on the digital strategy and user experience, helping to translate Breda’s city brand into a clear, modular platform design. Instead of separate pages per audience, they use themes like visit, work, study, and live, allowing content to stay relevant across different audience without repetition. The design also highlights local stories, events, and places, balancing inspiration with practical info.

Prepr powers the backend with a headless architecture, giving the team full control over how and where content appears, now and in the future. With Prepr, the platform can easily integrate with other systems, scale over time, and most importantly, use data to personalize the experience for every visitor. By tracking click behavior, campaign data, and search terms, Prepr allows Explore Breda to deliver relevant content to each user dynamically, without needing them to choose a specific audience path. This makes the platform feel intuitive and personalized, while still being simple to manage.

The platform also includes interactive features like bookmarks and personalized itineraries, encouraging users to actively engage, explore more, and return later. Everything is designed to be adaptable, ready to evolve as Breda’s goals, technology, and audiences change.