The Future of the American Public Gardens Association

Editor's Notes

• #2: Thank you for the opportunity to present to you again this year. We are very excited to share the direction APGA is headed and what we were able to accomplish this year, and as our largest gardens, we value your thoughts and opinions. In fact, we now have seven members of our Board that participate on the DLG, and I know they are keenly interested in what you have to say today. When I met with you last year in Hawaii, I gave you a preview of our strategic direction over the next 3-5 years, and I greatly appreciated your feedback. What I took away from that conversation was that you wanted to see APGA leverage partnerships to achieve our goals. You also indicated that you wanted to see tangible results, and concrete measures of success, and finally, you wanted to see APGA improve its basic service. I believe as I go through my presentation today, you will see that we took that feedback to heart as we refined the strategic plan.
• #3: Before I go into what we have done this year though, I wanted to give you a quick refresher on the strategic goals we have adopted.
• #4: That is why we felt it was extremely important that we develop a plan that provides a roadmap for us to achieve our goals over the next several years
• #5: In developing the plan, we started with the goals, and took a look at the organization to determine our capacity to achieve them. First we looked at our available resources, and the current structure and determined, we would need to make some changes. Next we reviewed our current programs and services to determine what, if any changes needed to be made. We also recognized that it was extremely important for us to have a way to regularly evaluate our progress. And finally, we need to be focused like a laser beam on mission focused activities if we are going to be successful.
• #6: So over the next three years, we will be primarily focused on the these six activities. Of course, in doing this, we cannot lose sight or our most important goal which is to provide a high level of service to our members, and I can assure you we are continually working in that direction.
• #7: Less than two years ago, the only partnership we had that benefited our member gardens was the BHS Insurance program. Then we developed the partnership with Rain Bird to create National Public Gardens Day. Over the last 12 months, we have developed more partnerships than we have in my entire tenure with the association, and each and every one of those partnerships is focused on achieving our goals. I will share information about these partnerships throughout my presentation, but I want to highlight two right here GRA MSA
• #8: Our second focus area will be on raising public awareness of public gardens and role you play in your community. The first step toward doing that was to hold the first ever National Public Gardens Day. Many of you have seen this video, but I would like to share it because I think what we were able to accomplish in less than one year is pretty amazing.
• #9: As I have talked to garden directors around the country, they have been very excited about NPGD, but have also asked what our objectives are in creating this day so I thought it might be helpful for you to see our objectives.
• #10: The next area of focus for APGA is to drive visitation to your gardens. Over the past several months, we have been in conversations with Better Homes and Gardens to explore ways we could partner that would benefit our member gardens. I am pleased to announce to you today, that we have reached agreement on a landmark partnership, and you are the first to be hearing about it. I am sure you are all aware of BHG, but I thought I would share a few important aspects of what they consider themselves to be. The demographic for BHG is pretty much exactly the same as your demographic. So as we were exploring the potential for partnership, we determined there are there areas we will focus… Inform the public about APGA gardens Drive visitation Build Loyalty
• #11: The first aspect of the relationship is to inform the public about APGA gardens. BHG will be doing this in three ways. First, BHG has an annual sweepstakes in conjunction with the introduction of its annual bookazine. This year that bookazine is called Dream Gardens Across America, and the winner of the sweepstakes will receive a Toyota Prius. All of the advertising around the sweepstakes will focus on national public gardens day including the landing page where you go to sign up. The second way BHG will raise awareness is to create a public garden finder. And the final way they are awareness is that they have created a slide show of 10 of our public gardens on their website, and over the next year, they will continue to load slide shows of our gardens across the country.
• #12: The second aspect of the relationship is for BHG to help us drive visitation to your gardens. So on Naitonal Public Gardens day, we will provide you with these buck slips that allow the recipient to download a version of Dream Gardens Across America, and they will have access to free online garden workshops. Finally, the most exciting aspect of the relationship is for BHG to help our member gardens build loyalty. When I talk to Directors across the country, one thing I hear frequently is that they need valuable benefits to help drive membership.
• #13: We are thrilled to announce that Better Homes and Gardens has agreed to give a free one year subscription to anyone who joins or renews their membership at your garden. We will have an initial trial period from March 15 to June 15 where they will give 500,000 subscriptions to your members. The reason it is a three month trial is because we want to assess it after that period to determine how it is working and if we need to make changes. Then we will introduce it again at the annual conference and run it for the rest of the year. The only caveats at this point are that the garden must be in the U.S. and you must charge at least $12 for your membership.
• #14: The project with APHIS is great, however, there is much more work to be done to drive funding to your gardens. First and foremost, we must find ways to help our member gardens access more IMLS funding. We receive only a very small percentage of the funds distributed each year. One thing we are doing to is to identify additional partners that will lend additional credibility to our proposals. Today, we submitted a IMLS leadership planning grant in partnership with the school of urban studies at Virginia Commonwealth University to study the impact our gardens are having on community greening initiatives. This planning grant is the precurson for a full blown leadership grant application to implement programs at our member gardens. We must also help our gardens identify private foundations the kinds of programs that would fund our member gardens, and help our member gardens understand the application process through private foundations. To that end, we will be adding Paul Kuenstner from the Fidelity Foundation to our Board this year. Paul has committed to helping us educate our members about accessing private foundation grants.
• #15: Another area we are where we are focusing our attention is on Driving Funding to our member gardens. I am pleased to announce another fantastic partnership. We found out this week that a project we submitted to APHIS for Public Gardens to be leaders in the educating the public about the impact of invasive pests ahs been funded. It is a partnership with the Cooperative State Research, Extensiona and Educaiton service of the USDA., which is now called NIFA….don’t know what that stands for??? In the coming weeks, we will announce the details fo this partnership.
• #16: I was reading an article on the flight out here from a 1996 issue of the public garden that discussed how APGA could and should get involved in advocacy at the national level. This is something we have been discussion since I came on Board.