Great Parks partners with NKU to track park attendance

Great Parks of Hamilton County is working with faculty and students at Northern Kentucky University’s Burkardt Consulting Center to create a dependable and statistically valid way to track park attendance.
 
Work began in early 2015, when Great Parks and the BCC mapped 72 survey points at 17 area parks and nature preserves. Great Parks staff and volunteers gathered about 12,000 manual samples from these points in order to provide the BCC with data.

Great Parks/NKU study

• 72 survey points at 17 area parks and nature preserves were mapped in the study
• 12,000 manual samples were gathered
• there were 4.63 million total park visits in one year
• total park attendance, is 6.82 million

 
From Sept. 2015-Aug. 2016, Great Parks reports that there were 4.63 million total park visits, and total park attendance, including drive through data, is 6.82 million.
 
In the next year, Great Parks and the BCC plan to develop new tools to provide monthly attendance information, as well as the ability to evaluate individual activity centers. Data will be used by Great Parks to monitor trends for making sound operating decisions, which will allow them to share the outcomes with the public and demonstrate the impact that parks have on the community. The data will also provide valuable justification to leverage tax funding on the local, state and federal levels.
 
The BCC is a transdisciplinary organization that provides statistical support for research on a variety of subjects, studies and experiments that involve elements of statistical modeling. The BCC supports both NKU and community clients.