The success of the ParkCheck pilot in 2005 has seen the entry of this new project to the stable of Yardstick
benchmarking tools available to parks managers.

Where Yardstick measures the inputs to parks management, ParkCheck measure the outputs – i.e. customer satisfaction.

Members please follow the link above to enter your survey results

• ParkCheck is a park user intercept survey that has been developed by a steering group of parks managers.
• It provides you with a ready made set of questions, a robust methodology, survey implementation instructions, training and tools.
• It enables participants to add a few specific questions to survey
• Survey data is supplied to a professional research company who analyse the data and produce a report containing results from all the participating organisations that enables comparison and benchmarking.

Reasons for surveying park users include:
• To influence resource allocation and budget setting
• To inform and make choices between competing priorities
• To assist in setting customer based service levels
• To drive asset management planning
• To measure how well we are doing
• To assist in setting and measuring performance measures
• To enable interaction with the customer, and not least
• To provide an element of independence in measuring service levels and user expectations

An article in the February/March 2007 issue of the Public Works Engineering journal by Chris Rutherford, provides a comprehensive review of the Yardstick and ParkCheck projects.

Programme currently under consideration.

For more information on ParkCheck contact Chris Rutherford - chris@yardstickglobal.org or phone 0064 21 351 602.

ParkCheck 2010 Door to Door Survey Entry Form

As an addition to the parks user intercept project the “DOOR TO DOOR” option as been developed by the NZRA technical group for use from 2010.

Councils have identified that some parks are rarely used or are probably appreciated by neighbours for their amenity while not actively being visited. The intent of this survey option is to enable a door to door survey to be completed to identify the value of the park to the neighbouring community, identify barriers for use and to identify what the local community desire for the park in the longer term.

The results of these DOOR TO DOOR surveys will over a period of time be benchmarked against each other to provide trend information as well as specific results relating to individual parks.

Judge's statement:
"The judges were impressed with how the information was collected and analysed, how complete the information was and that there was flexibility to cater the research for different types of parks."