Service providers of all kinds rely upon quality, accurate usage data to make sound decisions and investments in their services. Now imagine if your service was offered across 1900+ different locations, many of which required remote access, and consisted of 20,000km of trails across tens of thousands of hectares of land?
Recreation Sites and Trails BC (formerly BC Forest Service recreation sites and trails) provides numerous recreation opportunities through sound management of public areas on Crown Land. In a recent project, RSTBC partnered with OXD in order to improve their collection and management of visitor use data. Accurate and timely visitor use data informs RSTBC’s operational efforts, recreation investments, and reconciliation efforts.
RSTBC faced challenges with its current visitor use data collection process. The existing approaches were inconsistent across regions and districts, leading to the risk of data loss, duplication, and challenges in accessing reliable data. Without a unified data collection and management framework, it was difficult to consolidate and analyze visitor use trends at district, regional, and provincial levels, creating barriers to informed decision-making for recreation and reconciliation initiatives.
RSTBC’s processes differed from those at BC Parks, making it difficult to track and analyze annual recreation visitor use data across all recreation lands managed by the Province of BC.
To address these challenges, OXD collaborated with RSTBC to create a robust action plan for establishing an efficient and consistent recreation visitor use statistics process. Our team conducted qualitative research to understand the current state of visitor data collection, identifying opportunities for improvement beyond technology.
We also reviewed BC Parks’ processes and tools to identify similarities and differences between the historically separate organizations. This research revealed the need for changes to the organization, processes, technology, training and change management to create a unified system and framework that could streamline the collection, consolidation, and analysis of visitor use data.
Key considerations included:
- Exploring potential new technologies and integrating existing tools to expand their use for RSTBC.
- Co-designing an initial draft for the purpose of visitor use data creation and collection, in alignment with the province’s Data Management Policy.
- Surfacing organizational needs such as staffing, roles, and responsibilities to support long-term data collection and management success.
The insights from this collaboration will shape future investments and the development of a consistent and efficient visitor use statistics practice. By implementing a unified data collection framework, the RSTBC team can:
- Facilitate data sharing across district, regional, and provincial levels to support effective recreation resource management.
- Provide reliable data to inform decisions about operations, recreation investments priorities, and reconciliation efforts.
This work builds a foundation to address long-standing challenges in visitor use data collection. Our approach will ensure data is accessible, accurate, and actionable for Recreation Sites and Trails’ goals of improved recreation and reconciliation outcomes.