As parks and recreation professionals, you play a crucial role in fostering community engagement and enhancing the quality of life for your community members.
Conducting parks and recreation surveys is an effective way for agency professionals like yourselves to truly understand the needs of your community members by gathering valuable feedback and insights. Effective surveys not only help you prioritize impactful strategic decisions, but they also help increase customer satisfaction and engagement - if used correctly, of course!
Below you’ll find some high-level tips for building surveys and a list of 10 survey ideas for parks and recreation agencies, each of which includes:
Before diving into parks and rec survey ideas for your community members, we’ll cover a few important tips to consider when planning and creating your surveys.
These tips and more are covered in our comprehensive parks and recreation survey guide.
When building out your surveys – especially ones that you are sending to broader audiences – always be sure to include qualifying questions that allow you to segment feedback based on different categories. Examples could include questions about things like:
The most important step in producing and distributing a survey is knowing exactly what outcome you are trying to achieve through your survey efforts. There’s no question that survey’s can be a powerful tool for community engagement and planning, but like anything worthwhile, they require a lot of time and effort. This all starts with effective planning.
Our free parks and rec survey guide covers the differences between these types of data sets in detail – but at a high-level, here are the key differences:
🎯Goal: Determine community interest in various recreational programs and activities to tailor offerings to meet demand.
📢 Audience: General community members
❓ Survey Question Recommendations:
✅ How to Use This Information: With the information you gather from your survey responses, you can develop and schedule programs based on community interests and availability.
🎯 Goal: Gather feedback on the condition and usability of playgrounds and park equipment to guide maintenance and improvement efforts.
📢 Audience: Parents and caregivers of children under the age of 13
❓ Survey Question Recommendations:
✅ How to Use This Information: Prioritize repairs, upgrades, and new installations based on feedback to ensure safe and enjoyable play spaces.
🎯 Goal: Assess community preferences for using technology for parks and recreation operations.
📢 Audience: General community members
❓Survey Question Recommendations:
✅ How to Use This Information:
💡TIP: Xplor Recreation's all-in-one recreation management platform is designed to empower your community members by giving them a modern, easy-to-use online experience. The online portal is optimized for all browsers and is 100% mobile responsive. Xplor Recreation also offer's agencies their very own fully-native, custom-branded recreation management mobile app. Allowing agencies to provide best-in-class technology solutions to engage your patrons.
🎯 Goal: Assess the accessibility of recreational programming for individuals with disabilities or special needs.
📢 Audience: Individuals with disabilities, parents/caregivers of children with disabilities
❓Survey Question Recommendations:
✅ How to Use This Information: Determine what adaptive and inclusive programming opportunities you should prioritize to ensure equal access for all community members.
🎯Goal: Evaluate community satisfaction with existing parks to identify areas for improvement.
📢 Audience: Individuals with disabilities, parents/caregivers of children with disabilities
❓Survey Question Recommendations:
✅ How to Use This Information: Address any identified issues to enhance the overall park experience and increase community satisfaction.
Have survey ideas you want to share with your peers? Let us know at xr_marketing@xplortechnologies.com