Join the Harbinger Consultancy for a three-session online course (+ optional Q&A wrap-up session) starting January 19. Great for nature centers, heritage sites, trails, parks and nearby communities.

Get a handle on how locals and visitors use trails and parks —and what that means for your community—without breaking the bank or tearing your hair out.

Visitor surveys can be a great tool for gathering information and generating insights that help you attract more visitors or encourage them to return, manage the visitors you already have, help local businesses generate more business from nearby trails, heritage sites and parks; plan and fine-tune programs; tweak your marketing; raise money and forge partnerships.

But no matter how low-budget, visitor surveys require investing resources that are precious to your organization like time, money, volunteer effort, relationships, and even your reputation. This course will help you make sure those investments pay off with a resource-efficient approach that yields reliable, high-impact information.

In this course, you will:

- Learn how to create a survey plan that gives you the information you most need and fits your budget and other available resources.

- Identify your target audiences and how to reach and collect data from them.

- Learn whether, how and when to engage volunteers, partners and other community support.

- Learn how to develop a questionnaire that works.

- Review survey templates and models from other places.

- Learn how to organize, analyze, and learn from your data.

- Identify ways to use your findings to inform or promote action.