How is your Council managing parks & recreation in relation to others? And your pools?

Yardstick is IPWEA's latest project with a new focus on parks and recreation activities.

The Yardstick Series:

Yardstick PARKS  |  Yardstick POOLS  |  ParkCheck User Survey

Yardstick Parks: Benchmarking your parks services and operations

Yardstick™ is a proven international parks benchmarking initiative established in 2001 in New Zealand by local authority park managers, and introduced by IPWEA into Australia in 2005.

The project involves park agencies (generally local authorities) subscribing to the project and participating in the annual survey.

The information collected covers:

• levels of service
• financial information
• best practice
• asset management, and 
• policy and planning

This information can then be used for assisting with a wide range of purposes e.g. levels of service reviews, developing key performance indicators, measuring key result areas, policy and strategy development and review, cost estimating, contract or SLA unit price negotiation, improvement programming, factual support for seeking resources etc.

Quickly identify the level of service and performance for your organisation compared across the industry. Compare your results with other organisations of a similar size or situation.

Visit our Yardstick Parks webpages for further information

Yardstick Pools: Benchmarking for Pools and Facilities

Collecting information about facilities is crucial to enable effective management. Yardstick Pools is a business improvement initiative developed by the pools industry for the pools industry. It collects and compares information on the provision of services, cost of provision, revenue, usage, staff resources, programs and marketing, asset management, planning and policy information.

It is a reflection of the growing maturity and complexity of the aquatic industry that managers and Councils utilise a wide variety of management information for the effective running of facilities. Obtaining relevant and useful data is essential and Yardstick Pools has been designed to provide the range of information you require.

Use Yardstick Pools data for:

• Operational and financial reviews
• Pool development & design planning
• Performance measurement
• Direct pool to pool comparison
• Staff resource & pay reviews
• Industry analysis

Visit our Yardstick Pools webpages for further information

ParkCheck: A park user survey

Yardstick already provides the quantitative measurement of asset provision and service delivery.
ParkCheck is now available to measure the qualitative aspects of service provision.

What is ParkCheck?

• ParkCheck is a park user intercept survey that has been developed by a 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 Councils that enables comparison and benchmarking.

Visit our ParkCheck webpages for more information

For further information