The National Park Service turned 100 in 2016, and its role in shaping the American experience has never been greater. Nearly 331 million people visited a unit of the National Park Service in 2017. The four years from 2014 to 2017 were the four busiest years in the National Parks’ history, with 2017’s visitation total falling just 100,000 visitors shy of the all-time record, set in 2016.
Invisible to many of these visitors was the extent to which their experiences were influenced by organizations independent of the federal government. Through a variety mechanisms, the Park Service engages external partners to provide many of the products and services that have helped make visiting a National Park a national pastime. The beautiful lodge on Skyline Drive in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park? The gift shop and bookstore at the summit of Cadillac Mountain in Acadia? The eight-day rafting tour the Zion National Park? These quintessential features of the park experience are not provided by the government, but by a diverse and extensive group of companies and nonprofit organizations whose names you don’t know, but who nonetheless play a vital role in supporting and sustaining our most precious public lands, historic landscapes, wilderness areas, cultural landmarks, and monuments.
The Digital Divide
While the handoff from Park Service to external partners is all but undetectable to visitors once they’ve arrived at a park, the digital experience of planning a visit to a national park, or researching a topic or activity that is directly relevant to the national parks, can be a fractured, frustrating, and time-intensive process.
In the some cases, potential park visitors, researchers, or shoppers are unaware of the full breadth of products, services, and activities available to them via third-party partners. In the worst cases, visitors are forced to navigate a multitude of different websites and platforms to book lodging, plan activities, or reserve campsites.
A Vision for Tomorrow
In summer 2017, Threespot completed a six-month project with Park Service’s Digital Strategy Division to develop a cohesive and comprehensive roadmap for improving how users shop, research, and plan visits on the National Park Service website, the digital channels of partner organizations, and other online trip booking services.
Following an exhaustive review of the online trip-planning landscape, an audit of available analytics data from the Park Service’s various web properties, and more than 40 hours of interviews with stakeholders inside and outside the Park Service, a team at Threespot collaborated with our Park Service partners to develop a strategy focused on achieving three primary objectives:
- Build a seamless, integrated, and inclusive NPS brand in the digital space.
- Deliver higher customer satisfaction, awareness, and preparedness.
- Improve and increase the use of digital products and services to successfully complete transactions — no matter where audiences are located.
Digital travel planning, research, and purchasing are crowded marketplaces. Many of the Park Service’s private-sector peers use rewards programs to heavily incentivize their own trip planning tools, but the Park Service must concede that a growing portion of the millions of annual visitors may arrive at a park without having ever touched NPS.gov. As a result, many park visitors may arrive with incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated information and thus unprepared for their visit.
Threespot’s recommendations follow general best practices for a digital strategy: align tactics with the brand and mission; acknowledge and plan for external factors; align current and future priorities and execute in phases. The proposed tactics within the strategy run the gamut from unifying the Park Service brand across the digital landscape to investment in new digital tools to meet users’ 21st century expectations. The common thread, though, is democratizing information and expertise to support researchers, shoppers, and trip planners wherever they are.
Of course, the trip-planning pathways owned by the Park Service, such as Plan Your Visit, should be optimized and present the most complete and current information as possible about third-party products and services. But rather than getting in arms race with the myriad private-sector travel tools and booking sites, Threespot recommended that the Park Service leverage its unique value as the intersection of expertise, data, and access. The goal should be to ensure trip-planning experience is consistent and predictable, with accurate and complete information — whether a trip is being planned on NPS.gov or anywhere else in the digital realm.
Do Your Part
This project gave Threespot a new behind-the-curtains view of park operations that only reinforced what we already knew: Preserving America’s most precious natural and cultural resources is a community effort. From “mom and pop” general stores to large, full-service operators, the organizations and businesses that support our National Parks occupy an interdependent ecosystem that provides invaluable benefit to park visitors and the government itself. These businesses also fuel economic growth and employ thousands of workers.
This work never ends. Despite their unprecedented popularity, National Parks are under constant threat. Policy change, funding shortfalls, and environmental factors like climate change and pollution are just a few of the issues that will shape the future of the parks. There are a number of organizations whose sole mission is countering these threats, but they can’t do it alone. Here’s how you can get involved:
Advocate
Advocate for the parks via National Parks Conservation Association.
Give
Donate to the Park Service’s official donations partner, National Park Foundation.
Volunteer
Support the friends group of your favorite park.
Visit
Plan a trip to a park via these online trip-planning resources.
Share
Share a story about your favorite park experience via the National Parks Conservation Association’s MyParkStory site.
