At Yardstick, we provide the numbers so you can get back outside!
Parks and recreation deserve better data, so we’ve made it our mission to provide it. In doing so, we enable the industry to achieve consistent standards, empowering park managers to effectively communicate improvement needs or celebrate successes with councillors and residents alike.
What is Yardstick
Yardstick is a global parks and recreation best practice programme, developed by and for the industry. While the first editions of Yardstick were on paper, it now operates through a bespoke online tool, face-to-face visit from one of our Yardstick auditors, and a Yardstick survey team.
Yardstick provides two key services: benchmarking and user surveys.
Benchmarking
An annual benchmarking programme for government agencies looking to compare to other similar sized organisations and check their progress against best practice indicators.
User Surveys
An online survey tool and question sets specifically designed for park user surveys. These can be delivered by your team or ours. The results are able to be compared against your own results as well as other participating organisations.
Why Yardstick
Decisions Made Easy
Making decisions doesn't have to be a puzzle. Rely on Yardstick for easy decision-making and more peace of mind. We've got the benchmarks you need – relevant, meaningful, and ready to roll.
Keep Up with Best Practice
Easily keep up with best practice through our external audit process each year and best practice indicators in the programme. Receive annual ‘State of Nation’ industry reports on the current years Yardstick data.
Demonstrate Your Value
All industries require evidence and hard numbers to demonstrate the value they bring to their organisation and communities. Find easy access to the numbers you need for presentations, reports and proposals.
Justify change and funding needs
Get the numbers you need to prioritise funding in the right areas. Demonstrate with data the need for more resource, or re-allocation of finances into an area of dire need.
Pivot tables not needed
Save time on your spreadsheet analysis with downloadable charts, tables and data right at your fingertips.
Find the gaps
Need to know what is working and not working with your plans and budgets? We've got your back with timely insights that make planning a breeze.
Parks user surveys made easy
We’ve done the work, so you don’t have to. We have the questions and software set up so that you can ‘plug and play’ to find out meaningful park user satisfaction data quickly. Use the software with your own team on iPads or tablets or use our in-house survey team.
Join a global community of parks people creating better data
There is only one way to get better data across our industry – sharing. Join our community of cities, districts, and municipalities who know that the way forward is together. Make connections with similar sized organisations, learn lessons from auditors who have worked with organisations across the world.
The Yardstick Journey
We know that parks is an essential and complex public service, and time is precious. We also know that it can be incredibly difficult to talk about the needs of our industry, the benefits it provides, and how to improve together without consistent reporting or being able to compare with similar sized populations.
Yardstick is about making it easy to track down numbers and put them into action. We view this as a repeatable journey over three stages: be informed, track progress, and celebrate success.
The Yardstick Journey is an annual cycle, completed by organisations around the world through three distinct stages, each one benefiting from the other. The cycle repeats annually, allowing you to provide annual updates and see progress over time.
Be Informed
Input data into your annual Yardstick benchmarking survey, and begin to be able to see how you measure up against best practice indicators and your peers. Your individualised audit and report will provide you with the numbers and insights you need to plan for the year ahead and prioritise accordingly.
Receive your annual ‘State of Nation’ Yardstick industry report, and learn about the opportunities and challenges facing the industry across your country.
Track Progress
Compare your results against other similar sized organisations throughout the year, and track your own progress over time with your Yardstick Dashboard.
Measure the value of your parks to your community through Yardstick user surveys, also benchmarked and able to provide another insight into your progress. Take action on the insights found.
Celebrate success
Dynamic reports from Yardstick can be used to demonstrate strengths and weaknesses, and help you direct your funding to the areas of highest need. Align staff to common goals with clear and measurable outcomes that can be tracked through Yardstick over time.
Clearly demonstrate your success over time by knowing your numbers and charts, whether achieving best practice indicators or decreasing mowing cost. Yardstick makes it easy to give you the numbers so you can get back outside.
The process begins again at Be Informed, creating a cyclical improvement process that occurs each year.
Yardstick Benchmarking
How does it work?
Open
Each year, you will receive a notification that the Yardstick parks benchmarking survey is ‘open’. This means that any review of the programme from the previous year is complete, and the programme for the current year is open for data inputs.
The number of data inputs depends on your subscription level.
The parks benchmarking survey covers areas like park provision, operating and capital costs, climate change, community engagement, and more. There is also a best practice component which is scored separately by an independent auditor.
Submitted
Once you have entered your data, your survey is submitted.
In Review
Your benchmark status will be set to ‘In Review’ and it will be reviewed by one of our auditors. If there is an issue with the data or the auditor has a question they will get in touch.
Annual Audit
A benefit of being a Light or Pro member of Yardstick is receiving an individual audit, best practice score and feedback from one of our auditors.
We will be in touch with you about when auditors are planning to be in your area. In our experience, the value of meeting face-to-face is substantial and we will seek to do this wherever possible.
The auditor will score your organisation against the Best Practice Indicators and handle any discrepancies in data. They will also be able to provide live insights on the information provided to date, which can provide an opportunity for learning across your staff team.
Completed
Once the auditing process is complete, the data is checked one final time by our Yardstick Global Coordinator before being marked completed.
Once this has occurred, your data will be uploaded to the current year’s Yardstick data, and you can begin comparing against other organisations who have completed their benchmarks as well.
Reporting
You will receive a notification that the reporting function is open. You will then be able to access the reports download function for your organisation. You can download the whole report, or only some sections, or only 1 chart as you need.
You can filter to look at multiple years, or multiple organisations.
These reports are excellent for preparing the upcoming year of financial and service delivery planning.
Other resources
You will also receive a ‘State of Nation’ Yardstick industry report each year for your country, outlining the trends and lessons learned in the current reporting year.
Other insight reports from the Yardstick team will be made available to you throughout the year. These may include collated data on fees and charges (New Zealand only) or detailed data analysis on particular areas of Yardstick.