The Municipality of Ritchot partnered with ActiveXchange to gain a clearer, data-driven understanding of how residents and visitors use its parks, trails and community facilities throughout the year. Like many growing municipalities, Ritchot needed clearer evidence of how residents and visitors were actually using its parks and facilities to support planning and funding decisions. Traditional reporting captured bookings and anecdotal activity, but it didn’t reveal broader movement patterns across outdoor spaces, indoor venues and seasonal assets.
Movement Data provided a full picture of visitation, dwell time, seasonal behaviour and catchment profiles across 30 sites from September 2024 to August 2025. The results showed how different types of spaces serve different roles within the community.
Movement Data revealed that high visitation does not always mean identical function. In Ritchot, two of the municipality’s most active parks serve very different roles within the recreation network.
Looking deeper at the movement patterns behind each location reveals how these parks support very different types of recreation across the municipality.
St Adolphe Park functions as a community recreation space supporting everyday outdoor activity for residents and nearby visitors. The visitation profile shows steady activity across the week with moderate increases on weekends. Hourly movement trends build gradually through the day, peaking in the late afternoon between 4PM and 6PM, aligning with after-school and after-work recreation.
Movement origin data shows that a significant proportion of visitors originate from Winnipeg, while the park also serves residents from across Ritchot and nearby communities.
Ritchot uses this insight to prioritize maintenance planning, support investment in local recreation amenities, and demonstrate the importance of community parks that enable everyday physical activity.
Parc Optimist contains seven baseball diamonds, three softball diamonds and four hardball fields, positioning it as a core outdoor sport facility within the municipality. The visitation profile shows structured evening peaks consistent with league play and organized sport scheduling.
Movement origin data shows a substantial proportion of visitors originating from Winnipeg, confirming that the park functions as a regional sport venue attracting visitors from outside the municipality. While it remains locally important, more than half of its usage is tied to participants travelling into Ritchot for organized sport.
Ritchot now uses this insight to demonstrate regional reach in funding applications, justify continued investment in field infrastructure, and support partnerships with sport associations that operate beyond municipal boundaries.
Both parks are popular, but they serve distinct roles within Ritchot’s recreation ecosystem.
Ritchot uses this distinction to make better decisions about maintenance, programming, scheduling and investment. Rather than treating both high-use parks the same, this insight helps the municipality prioritize improvements, support sport partners and plan infrastructure upgrades in alignment with how each park functions in reality.
While the outdoor parks demonstrate differences in regional reach and leisure behaviour, Ritchot also examined how structured indoor facilities operate across the network.
Ste Agathe Arena is one of Ritchot’s primary structured sport facilities, supporting hockey leagues, tournaments, public skating and scheduled community ice time.
The Daily Visitation Trend clearly demonstrates the Arena’s structured demand pattern. Weekend lift is pronounced, which aligns with tournament scheduling, league play and concentrated weekend programming.
Ritchot can use this insight to align staffing levels with peak evening & weekend usage, prioritize maintenance scheduling, plan tournament capacity and justify infrastructure investment based on sustained, structured participation.
Unlike the Arena’s structured sport demand, the Cultural & Community Club demonstrates program-driven and event-based activity layered onto steady daily use.
The time series chart shows visible event-driven spikes above a consistent baseline, reflecting hosted functions and community gatherings.
The Visitation Dwell Time distribution reinforces this role. The strongest concentration of visits falls within the 1–2 hour band, closely followed by the 2–4 hour range. There is also a meaningful proportion of stays exceeding four hours.
Ritchot can use this insight to anticipate staffing requirements around events, demonstrate measurable programming impact and strengthen funding submissions ties to community activation and social use.
Although these facilities all generate significant visitation, they serve different functions within the community.
Ritchot uses these distinctions to make more targeted investment decisions, justify funding requests with evidence of real demand, position facilities appropriately within its recreation master planning, and report clearly to Council and stakeholders on how each space contributes to community participation.
By understanding how activity changes across facilities, Ritchot now moves beyond measuring busyness and instead plans confidently around the role each space plays within its broader recreation network.
Through Movement Data analysis, the Municipality of Ritchot has moved from anecdotal understanding to measurable evidence across its recreation network. These behavioural insights translate into measurable operational and strategic outcomes across Ritchot’s recreation network.
Demonstrating regional reach, sustained participation and event-driven impact with defensible visitation data rather than assumptions.
Scheduling activities around verified peak periods, understanding weekday versus weekend demand, and aligning activation strategies to actual behaviour patterns.
Identifying high-traffic locations and time windows to maximize visibility for wayfinding, public information and sponsorship displays.
Presenting clear, data-backed evidence of how parks and facilities are used, how far visitors travel, and how participation shifts seasonally.
Providing credible data on audience reach, dwell time and geographic draw to demonstrate measurable value to sponsors and partners.
Aligning maintenance, upgrades and capital planning with real usage patterns rather than perceived demand.
Understanding how different assets serve different roles within the broader participation ecosystem, ensuring long-term planning reflects measurable community behaviour.
