Kids' Interactive Web Site
This project will create an interactive, educational website for children 5-11 years old, motivating children to get outdoors.
By engaging in meaningful youth-targeted programs, Minnesota's young people may develop a lifelong interest in and stewardship for state parks and state trails. Our current visitor demographic is aging, and is not being replaced by younger people. As described in the Minnesota State Parks 2009-10 Marketing Plan, increasing the length of visits and acquiring new visitors to the parks and trails is essential to their long-term viability.
The DNR website has very little engaging, age-appropriate content for young children, and the new Parks and Trails kids' site is breaking new ground for the agency. There were 6,047 page views of the existing Parks and Trails kids' page (mndnr.gov/state_parks/kids.html) in calendar year 2011 and 7,646 page views in 2012. Because the new site is so different from any other content the DNR has made available to this age group (5-11), setting initial benchmarks is difficult. We expect to far exceed the page views of other kids' content on the site, and will collect baseline data and build future proposed measurable results off of that initial data once the new site has launched. Future proposed measures will quantify page views and conversion rates.
Produce a new engaging age-appropriate website for young children.
A vendor was selected after an RFP process and a standalone Flash-based kids’ site has been designed programmed and beta tested. The site is now completing final testing and the prize fulfillment path is being put in place on the reservations website and in the parks. The new kids' site will launch on the public DNR website in mid-March with a public promotion during grade school spring break the first week of April 2013. After the new site has been publicly announced we will begin measuring page views and other metrics to track its ongoing success.