The success of the ParkCheck pilot in 2005 has seen the entry of this new project to the stable of Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia (IPWEA) endorsed and governed benchmarking tools available to Australian (and New Zealand) parks managers.

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

• 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.

Please note the timeframes are approximately 1 month ahead of those used in 2006.

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

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."