Community Recreation Finds Early Wins Through Statting

October 24, 2017 10:00 AM
by Bradley Albert

The Community Recreation Division (CRD) within Community and Cultural Services offers a variety of programs, facilities and permits that provides the community opportunities for enriched physical, social and emotional health. Working in partnership with the Performance Management team, we developed a detailed dashboard that captured a mutual outcome, four goals, several projects/activities, metrics and milestones. 
 
The outcome metric we developed is to increase new resident participation by 5% for fiscal year 17/18. The four goals we chose were to (1) enhance marketing efforts; (2) expand programs offered; (3) maximize facilities; and (4) improve the online registration process. These goals will help us to understand the barriers residents face in participating in our programs, and then to remove them. We extracted data from the ActiveNet (recreation management software system) to measure resident participation in each of our programs/activities.  We then identified areas of opportunity that included capacity, marketability, and staffing levels.  The data visualization tool we chose is the image of a scoreboard listing the outcome, goals, time remaining and progress toward completion.  The scoreboards will be published quarterly to let all staff know how we are progressing toward our outcome.
 
An early win resulted directly from this effort through a milestone that was identified by our Aquatics team. A meeting was set-up with Santa Monica College to request additional pool time at the Santa Monica Swim Center. It turned out that they were able to offer us an additional 12.5 hours of programmable time each week.  We are currently in the process of analyzing the budget and programming options for this extra time.  Working with the Performance Management team has provided the framework to make this possible.  It provides the Recreation Division with a focused vision and plan for our work to enabling us to better serve the community.

Authored By

Bradley Albert
Community Recreation Manager