5.8 Marketing, Communications and Promotion
As shown in Table 5-7, there is considerable potential to build social media use for communication purposes, which could include creating social media accounts specific to recreation. Residents who are interested in recreation services may be more likely to follow/subscribe to an account dedicated to this topic than general municipal updates. Staff operating these accounts can also quickly re-share upcoming programs, events, and news from other community providers. This is particularly useful for community events that are not regular occurrences and so are not published in the Recreation Guide. Those that are spontaneously organized or occur only once can be quickly promoted via dedicated social media channels. As noted in Section 5.3, however, the current part time allocation does not provide sufficient coverage for both creating promotional material and communicating with the public on a day-to-day basis. Communications channels can also be used by the Town to promote its work in parks, culture and recreation services. The Municipality of Port Hope, for example, produces an annual graphically portrayed Parks, Recreation and Culture Year-in-Review 14 that summarizes the past year’s work in developing, operating, and maintaining these services. Much of this information is already available or would be captured in monitoring activities and could be used to produce an ‘annual report’ to Town residents.
The Town’s work would benefit from a marketing plan that clearly establishes its business objectives in recreation, culture and parks services and develops a comprehensive strategy to achieve them. The long-standing 4Ps of marketing are product, price, place and promotion. While pricing public services differs from that of the private sector, the other aspects of marketing are important to shaping the municipal role in service delivery in the face of increasing demands/expectations and fiscal constraints in responding to these. Of particular importance in Tillsonburg is the communications component of service delivery. This emerged as a key area for improvement. While together, the marketing staff person and the Department produce a high quality, informative Recreation Guide, the potential for real time communications through social media is lacking. Table 5-7 demonstrates these limits to community awareness of/learning about recreation services, as reported by survey respondents. Table 5-7: Use of information sources about recreation services
% of 400 responses
Source
Town website
45% 33% 22% 16%
Recreation Guide
Tillsonburg News Word of mouth
3% 2%
None of the above/ do not use
12%
14 https://www.porthope.ca/en/your-municipal- government/prc-year-in-review.aspx
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Town of Tillsonburg | DRAFT Parks and Recreation Master Plan
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