Save Milton Country Park

In December 2006 South Cambridgeshire District Council's cabinet decided to close our local country park if no one could be found to take it on by 31st August 2007.

We were involved in the campaign to save the Park right from the start and took the lead in setting it up. We bought the domain SaveMiltonCountryPark.com and used it to start on electronic petition. On the front page of the site we stated the aim of the campaign and we solicited name, email address and post code of supporters.

Save Milton Country Park screen shot

The site had lots of supporting pages including a FAQ page, a photo gallery, and a news section with an RSS feed. All pages had a count down showing how many days there were before the park was closed. We encouraged other local web site owners to carry our red ribbon to advertise the campaign web site and many did.

We eventually had over 10,000 supporters signed up. 8,950 via the web site and a further 1,432 via paper forms.

When supporters signed up via the web site we checked postcodes to ensure they were valid and used this to analyse where our supporters came from by both district council and for the two local districts we also did analysis by ward. These statistics were an invaluable weapon in showing how widespread the support for the park was (many councillors had previously claimed it was only of interest to people in the immediately surrounding villages).

On the web site we also asked supporters to fill in a more detailed questionnaire which allowed us to do more detailed analysis on how often people used the park and what they used it for.

All the data we solicited allowed us to run three mailing lists for the campaign: a news list to keep people informed which had over 8,000 subscribers, a volunteers list for people who had indicated via the questionnaire that they could help us further and a lobbyists list of people who were willing to lobby their councillors when we asked them to (again indicated via the questionnaire). We put all of these lists to good use during the campaign.

We also ran two other web sites during the campaign: a public site to allow people to pledge financial support called Pledge for the Park (at www.PledgeForThePark.com - no longer online) and a private Wiki using DocuWiki to allow the campaign committee to share information.

The park was saved in July 2007 when the Cambridge Sport Lakes Trust were appointed by SCDC as their preferred bidder to take on the park.