What is GoParksLondon?
GoParksLondon promotes London parks and friends groups. We want to encourage Londoners to visit London’s many beautiful green and blue spaces, especially the less-frequently visited ones, and we also want to encourage Londoners to engage with the friends groups and community groups who volunteer in these spaces. To do this, we are running promotional campaigns. To date we are working with ten London councils, but we would like to expand to cover as much of London as possible.
We also have a map with over 4,000 green and blue spaces in London, and each of these spaces has its own webpage, with information about nature and history, and some sites have pages that the friends group has created with more detailed information about what visitors will find in the park.
What does the promotional campaign involve?
We will create posters, social media ads, and images for newsletters, bespoke for your borough. We will promote these images through our networks and encourage councils to share the images and the messaging through their channels, too. We can also create images based on a particular theme: for example, one council asked us to create tennis-related images to help promote their tennis campaign.
Our images will direct people to each borough’s page on our site, where there is a map of each borough’s parks, and this page can also be a place to host council initiatives, such as active travel schemes or council-led walking tours around green spaces. For example, see this page for Merton. The borough map can also be embedded on your parks webpage.
We can also host walking and/or cycling ‘Discover the parks’ events, where we work with the council, active travel groups and friends groups to devise a map linking green spaces with safe and quiet routes so that people can enjoy a trip around each borough’s parks and learn about how friends groups help shape these spaces. Some groups have been able to recruit new volunteers through these events, and friends groups enjoy the opportunity to highlight their work.
What do councils have to do?
Councils can be as involved as they wish, but councils with more involvement are more likely to get greater benefit from the campaign. It is really helpful when councils mention the campaign in their communications with residents or re-post our messages on social media – we often see an uplift in hits to those pages on our site. It is also helpful to let us know about your own campaigns or initiatives so that we can support those through our channels.
Councils can also support the campaign by encouraging their friends groups to sign up to GoParksLondon. Over 260 friends group pages have been created on our site, with great information such as things to do, features, facilities, photos and social media links to the friends group, so people can find out how to get involved. Encouraging friends groups to sign up is a great way of offering support to friends groups and promoting their work.
How can we start a campaign?
If you’d like your council to start working with GoParksLondon, please contact Laura (laura@cprelondon.org.uk) and we’d be delighted to set up a meeting to discuss working together.
