Organization of public parks and recreation Web pages: Application of social marketing concept

This thesis served as an exploratory study to examine if social marketing messages were observable at public parks and recreation agency Web sites. A sample of 138 Web sites were chosen by a systematic method from 216 California Parks and Recreation Society public agencies. The initial assessment procedure examined Web site contents using computer content analysis and resulted in frequency counts of terms. It was found that more than 93% of the CPRS agencies had one or more social marketing messages in their Web sites. Recreation benefit descriptors play, fun, learning, nature, and flow were the most frequently stated recreation benefits in agency Web sites. The results also revealed no significant difference between agency budget size and use of Web site social marketing messages. The conclusion was that agencies with Web sites invested conceptually and extensively social marketing, adopting language of the national recreation benefits campaign.