Nesta survey picture
Rethinking Parks is an initiative working with 11 teams to explore new ways to use, manage and make the most of the UK’s public parks.
Nearly 190 people on the Rethinking Parks stakeholder list responded to the December 2014 survey on current and preferred ways to engage with Nesta, the independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK.
Here are six key research highlights, as defined by Nesta:
There’s a strong interest in community management models of parks and a preference to learn from other parks projects.
A total of 79.7% respondents chose community involvement in parks as the park area of most interest, followed by learning from other parks (70.6%). Income generation for parks rated at the third most interesting park area (64.2%).
Respondents access national and local news sites online more often than using social media.
Respondents commonly use national news sites on a daily basis (68.4%), and local news sites on a weekly basis (37.4%). Over half of the respondents hardly ever/never use social media (51.3%), blogs (53.5%), online forums (56.1%) or LinkedIn (51.9%)
Respondents found networking, hearing from individual speakers, and site visits most useful from events attended.
Just over two thirds of respondents found networking (62%) and individual speakers (61.5%) as the most useful type of events. Site visits (54.6%) and round table discussions (49.7%) followed.
Time is the most cited reason for people not being able to engage in learning.
Respondents cited time (48.1%), not relevant to me (48.1%) and information overload (15.6%) as the most common reasons stopping them from accessing and applying information and ideas.
Respondents cited How-to Guides, e-mail newsletters, visits to sites, events local to them and practical information on new revenue models as preferred learning formats.
Over two-thirds of respondents (71%) found How-to Guides the most helpful format for practical and applicable information, followed by email newsletters (59.1%), digital toolkits (52.2%) and reports (5101%).
Text on-line and face-to-face were preferred methods for absorbing new information.
Respondents largely preferred to absorb new information through text online (70.1%), face-to-face (65.8%) and infographics/images (39.6%).
See the full list of results and graphs on the Nesta blog Getting engaged: insights from Rethinking Parks communications research.
