How councils can benefit from Parkapiki

Councils do an amazing job looking after hundreds of community parks, reserves and open spaces. As Parkapiki will be listing them, as well as encouraging their community to be active we think there’s a number of ways Parkapiki can benefit councils. Here’s eight that come to mind.

1. Grandstand public parks and outdoor places

Try to find a park or outdoor place with particular facilities and features and you’ll have to visit a host of web sites. That’s why we started Parkapiki – to provide a home for all the parks and outdoor places, people and events in one easy-to-navigate platform. So, if you want to promote your parks and open spaces why wouldn’t you list them on a dedicated site?

2. Jump to the top of a search result

Once on Parkapiki, your parks will be live in our search engine where people can search by post code, location, name, facility and feature. Anyone can create a Park Page about any location but only owners/managers of parks and outdoor places can acquire an Official Park Provider badge that will prioritize them in a search result. An Official Park Provider badge provides gravitas.

3. Listing, editing and management service

It’s easy and quick for councils to create Park Pages on Parkapiki by simply cutting and pasting information from their own web site. But if councils want to update their park information Parkapiki provides an outsourced editing and photography service to create content suitable for both web sites. We recommend limiting information on Parkapiki and sending search results to the council web site for more detailed information and increased SEO. Once a Park Page is published we can work with councils to edit, moderate and manage the page and respond to comments and suggestions on their behalf.

4. Gather feedback on your parks and open spaces

Parkapiki provides a number of communication platforms from which councils can engage their local community and beyond. Each Park Page has a section where we encourage visitors to comment on their experience helping to build an objective picture of the place. This ‘tripadvisor’ type of tool provides councils with real time feedback on which they can respond and/or act.

5. Share park and open space strategy

Councils are able to create and list a Profile Page to which they can link all their Park Pages and describe their open space or any other relevant strategy. Through Parkapiki’s social networking service they can build a community connected through their parks and open spaces where interaction and conversation can take place. Many councils use Facebook to gather feedback but as Parkapiki is dedicated to parks and open spaces it’ll keep conversation on topic.

6. Promote health and wellbeing and motivate active ageing

Apart from promoting the goodness of parks and park people, Parkapiki provides real opportunities to motivate healthy and active ageing. Our focus groups from Office for the Ageing’s feedback network told us they love to enter competitions which is one of the reasons why we created the Winapiki geo-fencing competition toolkit - so councils could provide opportunities for their older residents to win stuff for simply taking a walk in a park.

7. Support local businesses and stakeholders

By creating a Winapiki or Park Page councils are able to access the display advertising real estate on that page. While we understand councils are not in the business of selling advertising, it provides them the opportunity to promote local events and stakeholders.

8. Promote council events

Did we mention that Parkapiki has a search engine for events? Councils can upload their events to the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse where we, as a license holder, will pull them down onto Parkapiki’s events search engine.