By: Valerie Jauregui and Kelsey Coats
There are many reasons people might not use their local parks and recreation amenities. According to Texas A&M AgriLife Extension’s Urban and Municipal Parks program (UMP), some reasons cited by residents for nonuse are time, age/age appropriateness, proximity/connectivity, utilizing other resources, lack of knowledge, and usability (Walker et al.,2022). As practitioners, we cannot necessarily address some of these reasons (i.e., time), or they require additional time to address (i.e., proximity/connectivity). However, lack of knowledge is one barrier that can be reasonably addressed in the short term. The Working on Wellness Environments (WOW-E) and WOW-E communities have sought communication strategies to address the lack of knowledge of parks and public spaces for being active.
‘How do you Park’ communication campaign – Vernon, Texas
The City of Vernon Community Development department, Vernon Main Street and Tourism, and other partners identified a lack of knowledge of public parks, outdoor spaces, and ways to be physically active in the community. Together, they applied for the 2024 WOW-E Community Challenge to receive technical assistance to develop, plan, and evaluate a communications campaign to promote their local parks and physical activity amenities.
With assistance from the WOW-E team, the local Vernon group attended WOW-E cohort sessions to define and analyze their audience, assess communication strategies to best fit their audience, complete an amenity inventory of all of the amenities available at their parks and public spaces, conducted community engagement to inform their graphics and messaging for the campaign, and planned their communication campaign and evaluation methods.
The group kickstarted their campaign in May. Their billboard is currently running, and they have placed concrete clings promoting their parks around town. The group has also started posting on their social media profiles and will engage with their local community through messages, shares, and hashtags. The local team will continue to evaluate and monitor their campaign to gather feedback and responses. To learn more about these efforts, visit the City of Vernon Facebook page and the Vernon Mainstreet and Tourism Facebook page.
WOW-E’s 2023 Active People Healthy Nation pilot awareness campaign
WOW-E collaborated with three communities in South Texas to pilot test a communication campaign to increase park and public space awareness for people to be active. The campaign was part of the CDC’s Active People, Healthy Nation effort to get 27 million more Americans active by 2027. Listening sessions found that an existing shared value among the audience was time with family and friends, which helped guide the campaign. Focus groups helped ensure that communication materials, messages, and imagery were relevant to the community. The focus groups also increased awareness themselves, as one participant said, “I did not know there were this many parks.”
WOW-E’s APHN awareness campaign ran for approximately eight weeks. The communication campaign consisted of billboards, social media posts, banners, ground stickers, bookmarks, amenity inventories, and maps of the communities’ parks and places to be active. The campaign website included the maps and amenity inventories. Billboards included a short URL to the campaign website, social media posts included links to the campaign website, and ground stickers and bookmarks included QR codes to the campaign website. Social media posts, billboards, bookmarks, and banners were offered in English and Spanish. Different versions of the communication products ran in different communities. To read more about this effort, visit our blog! Interested in becoming a WOW-E community? Click here to see if your community is eligible.
Resources:
Walker, J.R., Lee, J., Gunderson, E., & Coats, K. (2022, September 20 – 22). If you build it will they come? the nonuse phenomenon. [Poster presentation]. 2022 National Parks and Recreations Association Annual Conference, Phoenix, AZ, United States. https://agrilife.org/urbanparks/files/2024/12/Urban-and-Municipal-Parks-2022-NRPA-Poster.pdf