Marketing a Country Park

I spent some time today with some MBA students from the Judge Business School who are doing marketing plan for Milton Country Park as a project for their MBA. It brought make memories of trying to do the same when we were looking at taking on the park ourselves via some sort of community trust.

And when you look at it it's very hard to do. There's two aspects to it. First you're trying to encourage people to use the park at all. That's the easy part, relatively speaking. You can keep the park in the news, especially if you've got a sympathetic local press which we have, so people are continuously reminded that you're there. And you can run events to give people a reason to come to the park for the first time. Both Cambridge Sport Lakes Trust, who now run the park, and the Friends of Milton Country Park have a programme of events through the year.

The harder part is how you separate the visitors from their money. That's a tricky one as it's a public park and people don't expect to pay for it.

Surprisingly they do seem to have accepted paying for car parking, which surprised me, and that's now bringing in a steady income.

After that it gets trickier. The new café facility does appear to be a success: there were certainly people sitting both inside and outside drinking coffee yesterday lunchtime, which was pretty good for November, but it's a seasonal thing and the profit margin for that sort of enterprise isn't great.

There's also limited scope for income from the Visitor Centre itself, even in its current format but once you get past there it gets tricky and I don't have the answers so I look forward to seeing what this group can come up with.