National heritage areas (NHAs) are a form of protected area management that rely exclusively on partnerships. NHA designations haveincreased rapidly in the last 20 years, generating a substantial need for information about how NHAs work and the outcomes asso-ciated with the NHA process. Several recent qualitative evaluation studies of NHAs have identified the importance of understanding network structure and function in the context of evaluating NHA management effectiveness or performance. This paper extendsprevious evaluation research on NHAs by applying NETDRAW (a popular visual approach to network analysis) as well as a statis-tically more robust approach known as exponential random graph modeling to data collected at three sites. Study findings provideinsight into the “health” of each of these networks in terms of balancing the degree of network openness versus the degree of network closure. More importantly, this study demonstrates the potential of using quantitative network analysis as an indicator of NHAeffectiveness.