August 2010 - Parks & Recreation - 36

2002 study for the American Journal of Preventive
Medicine showed that community-wide fitness
campaigns also help, by succeeding in encouraging, on average, 4.2 percent of residents to begin
engaging in regular physical activity.
If even one in 10 of those newly active persons
transitions from obesity to a healthy weight, medical costs would fall by $6.30 for each man, woman,
and child in that city per year. In Washington, D.C.,
with 600,000 residents, that translates to $3.7 million-an amount that dwarfs what is spent on park
marketing in Washington. In fact, that is more than
the country's largest park marketing budget, the
$2.7 million spent by the Chicago Park District (for
a city of 2.8 million people). Compared to expected benefits, every city park marketing effort in the
country is underfunded.

Think Like a Gym
Gyms, which are the private-sector counterparts to
public park systems, have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. Capitalizing on the market for physical activity, gyms have steadily increased
their advertising expenditures. As a result, the number of American gym memberships increased by
40 percent between 1998 and 2008. Bally Total Fitness, which is among the largest of publicly traded
gyms, spent 8 percent of its annual revenues on advertising in 2007. (Financial records are not available
from privately held companies such as Gold's Gym.)
By comparison, the average city park system spends
0.3 percent of its budget on marketing.

34 Parks & Recreation

SEPTEMBER 2010

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Of course, marketing a profit-driven, privatesector company is quite different from promoting
a public, government-operated resource. On the
private side, the goal is the highest possible revenue after subtracting expenses, even if that means
overlooking many potential customers-or, as the
Small Business Administration instructs entrepreneurs new to marketing, " Profitable sales volume is
more important than maximum sales volume. " Private gyms follow this profit-driven logic, focusing
on a particular niche: those with the physical stamina and financial ability to join. Typically, these are
people with above-average income between the
ages of 18 and 65.
Park agencies, in contrast, are pedaling uphill
and into the wind. To successfully affect public
health, the departments must persuade those who
are sedentary or overweight to become active in
parks. But reaching this least likely group is not inexpensive, and some agencies make the most of
their squeezed budgets by focusing on subgroups.
In Phoenix, knowing that 80 percent of its recreation
program participants have attended a program in
the past, the Department of Parks and Recreation
cuts costs by mailing activity catalogues only to previous participants and other likely park users. This
protects the budget but keeps the habitually unfit
shut out of information they could use. (The agency does make modest additional outreach efforts in
certain targeted neighborhoods.)
Since no city park department has sufficient
resources to market its lands and programs the

August 2010 - Parks & Recreation

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