PERSPECTIVES A MESSAGE FROM NRPA’S LEADERS Investing in Marketing To Tell Your Park and Recreation Story Proper investment in marketing is critical to communicate our park and recreation stories. If done correctly, it will result in increased investment in your agency. When I first became superintendent in Bristol, Connecticut, I had the unique opportunity to devel-op three new full-time positions within my first year to help strengthen the department. One of those positions was slated to be a recreation coordinator. Pretty quickly into my tenure, I saw several chal-lenges in the department when it came to marketing and communicating our services. This included a social media presence that was all over the map and was being managed by every supervisor in the department. Our flyers and brochures didn’t have a lot of rhyme or reason, or any clear, recognizable branding that identified us. With these challenges, I recognized the opportunity to shift that recreation coordinator role into a community engagement coordinator charged with enhancing our department’s marketing, communications and outreach strategy. While somewhat unpopular at the time, seven years later, it yielded tremendous results and has been one of the best investments I made as superintendent. Throughout the past seven years, the community engagement coordinator has bolstered our marketing, communications and outreach in ways we had never fully imagined. This includes implementing best practices around flyer design, building press release templates, and establishing a department brand and brand guidelines for all public-facing materials. We invested resources in marketing and communications platforms to improve the professional distribution of information. With improved planning and coordination, we now have a robust social media marketing calendar that forecasts our marketing needs. The calendar gets reviewed monthly at our leadership team meetings to ensure we are mar-keting at the right times and for the right programs. An ancillary benefit was that supervisors learn about what oth-er divisions are working on through our marketing calendar. This improved staff awareness and marketing strategy has resulted in maximizing the social media algorithms, boosting overall engagement. Investing in the community engagement coordinator has allowed us to tackle higher-level engagement projects that have advanced the way we communicate and interact with the public. For example, we built the Parks Project Portal, a dynamic webpage that allows residents to view all park projects and related design documents, timelines, cost estimates, feasibility studies, public engagement meeting videos and more. The public is also able to engage with each project by submitting comments and feedback that help shape decisions to ensure we meet the needs of our residents. We also have increased the volume and quality of impact reports that uplift department activities and show the community our impact by the numbers. For example, want to know how well our Arts and Culture Division community theater program did in 2025? You can check the impact report and see everything at a glance, including the number of tickets sold, the number of attendees, total volunteer hours, percentage of satisfied patrons and more. These impact reports are critical to com-piling meaningful data that tell our park and recreation story. These projects and reports wouldn’t be possible without a dedicated marketing and communications position embedded within the administration division of our department. Investing public dollars in marketing may not seem like the “sexy” thing to do when you may have a number of programmatic and operational priorities, but it is essential to communicating your park and recreation story. Remember, stories that are exciting, dynamic and visually pleasing will result in new dollars being invested in your parks, programs and services. JOSHUA T. MEDEIROS, ED.D., CPRE Chair, NRPA Board of Directors 6 Parks & Recreation | APRIL 2026 | PARKSANDRECREATION.ORG
Parks Recreation Magazine April 2026: Page 6
