Imagine a program that clearly organizes and displays information about your local park and recreation agency, maps event locations and allows sharing across social media platforms, packaged into an easy-to-use smartphone app. GoStrive Founder and CEO Choton Basu had that vision, and he recently launched an innovative product with the goal of bringing park and recreation agencies and their constituents into a closer working relationship and a new era of communication.
GoStrive: Engaging Communities
While sifting through myriad websites in an attempt to sign his kids up for swimming lessons, Basu longed for a portal that would easily allow him to see all the programs available in his area and where they were held, plus provide a quick way to register. “He started thinking about creating an app to allow citizens to log on to one platform and view all the recreation opportunities in the surrounding area, and even across the nation,” says Eric Hamp, senior manager of member relations at NRPA. “[Basu] reached out to [NRPA]. We saw the natural fit of this as a community engagement platform for park and recreation agencies, and we’re the national leader for those agencies. This is the next generation of integration and engagement platforms, and we’re on the leading edge of that.”
More than three years of brainstorming, planning and testing followed, and in October 2013, GoStrive made the app available exclusively for free to all NRPA members. It’s up to the individual agency to input their program guide offerings to GoStrive — once done, community members who download the app can see information on available recreational activities, sign up for classes or programs, and share status updates via Twitter or Facebook. The aim is to provide a seamless community engagement platform that brings information on a wide range of activities to the screen of any iPhone or Android device. It’s a win-win, both for park and recreation agencies and the communities they serve. “NRPA is trying to bring recreation services to everybody more easily,” Hamp adds. “That’s why we partnered with GoStrive — we share that mission of easier access to programs and facilities.”
GoStrive: Agency Impressions
Of course, getting agencies to buy into this new technology is its own sort of mission. “Agencies have to pick it up first — there’s no value to the end user until their community’s information is in the app. Agencies need to make the choice to be on the cutting edge of community engagement,” Tara Fitzpatrick-Navarro, vice president of membership and professional development at NRPA, says. Those that have signed on early to GoStrive report the app already has had a significant impact on how program information is disseminated to the community, both in content and format. “All the program details that were previously listed in our program brochure or online are now on your phone,” says Matt Amundson, director of Wisconsin-based Whitewater Parks and Recreation. “People are so tuned in to their phone, so bringing our offerings to the phone is very important.”
Amundson said inputting all that information also caused his agency to examine how programs are titled and organized. “Something as simple as how we name or label our programs we’ve looked at carefully,” he says. “How it shows up in the app and what the consumer sees is critical. It’s forced us to look at things more from a digital standpoint — how it displays on the phone — rather than how it will look in a brochure or how we’ve done it in the past.”
Such a paradigm shift is a practical necessity as park and recreation agencies move into 2014. According to recent reports from Forbes.com and the Pew Research Center, 56 percent of American adults own a smartphone; in the 18–34 demographic, 80 percent have smartphones; and 20–25 million of the 95 million individuals who don’t currently own a smartphone are expected to make the switch this year. “Our customers have asked for [mobile options] in the past, and as we move forward into a new generation of parents, they will demand we have those technological capabilities for our customers,” Amundson adds.
That prediction also is substantiated by already existing data. “The statistics about mobile usage are huge,” Fitzpatrick-Navarro says. “Moms, people of a lower socioeconomic status, minorities — public park and recreation programs are designed to benefit all, including those categories. By only advertising via the Web, those people who lack Internet access outside mobile can’t engage. [GoStrive] makes that awareness, information and engagement available to everyone in an easy-to-use way.” The numbers bear out, again from Pew: As of May 2013, 63 percent of adult cell owners use their phones to go online and 34 percent of cell Internet users go online mostly using their phones, rather than via desktop or laptop computer.
GoStrive: Looking to the Future
To date, more than 100 agencies across 22 states have signed up to try GoStrive. This year, developers hope to convince 1,000 additional agencies to follow suit and move their operations fully into 21st-century communication modalities. “A major concept around GoStrive is that the way in which people make decisions has changed…and the definition of community has changed to incorporate online social communities,” Fitzpatrick-Navarro says. Agencies clinging to their old-school print program guides may be missing an extremely effective form of outreach, if not sitting under their noses, resting at their ears. “Failing to [explore GoStrive’s mobile capabilities] means not having a larger reach into your audience,” James Jackson, president and COO of GoStrive, says. “[With GoStrive], your information will reach users across the country, and you’re reaching people even beyond their smartphone to Facebook, Twitter.... It’s a living, breathing program guide, and it’s incredibly easy for agencies to get involved.”
GoStrive is anticipating a number of improvements as the app continues to be adopted across the country. Amundson says Whitewater Parks and Rec is feeling very optimistic about certain capabilities in the pipeline. “We’re excited about future product updates that GoStrive will implement, particularly notifications,” he says. “We’ve added new programs and soon we’ll start a new sports season. Being able to push a notification out to consumers who have the app, providing that simultaneous update, is going to be a huge step forward for us.”
Amundson also anticipates greater interest in GoStrive by other community organizations like youth sports leagues and even libraries. “The technology and that functionality that we now have access to will draw in new community partners to work to a new extent with others,” he said. “I envision GoStrive becoming the resource where everybody goes to find out what’s happening. From a park and recreation standpoint, we’re acting as a catalyst for bringing people together and really building that sense of community that perhaps doesn’t exist everywhere.”
Samantha Bartram is the Associate Editor of Parks & Recreation Magazine.