The Outdoor Foundation Releases 11 Participation Reports

Sports planners and event officials who want to know what events are growing might have some new resources at their disposal.

The Outdoor Foundation released 11 individual outdoor participation activity reports that enable industry stakeholders to better target, understand, and identify participants in select outdoor activities.

The reports mark the first time the Foundation is providing greater insight into participation into the specific activities of adventure racing, mountain biking, paddle sports, trail running, climbing, stand up paddling, sport climbing, road bicycling, hiking, bird watching, and backpacking.

Readers of the 2015 Individual Activity Reports can visualize historical trends within specific activities from 2007 to 2014, and see each activity’s average annual growth and participation rate changing over a one- and two-year span. Crossover participation details which additional activities participants enjoy, segmented by the number of participants, participation rate, and index.

Perhaps most valuable, the reports profile casual and core participants as well as males and females. These profiles are broken into demographics—age, ethnicity, income, geography, and education—and spliced by:

• Total number of participants: Americans participating in 2014

• Segment percent: the share of each sub group

• Participation rate by group: percentage of that group’s total US population who are participants

• Index vs. total population: the percentage of participants compared to the percentage that group represents in the total U.S. population

“Outdoor Foundation research investigates the depth and effect of American’s participation in active outdoor recreation,” said Chris Fanning executive director, Outdoor Foundation. “With these new reports, we are proud to provide information about participants that will help the entire outdoor community better respond to participation trends in specific outdoor categories and shape the recreation strategies of the public."

The reports, which are based on nearly 11,000 interviews in the U.S., are available for purchase and are offered at a discounted rate for OIA member organizations.

The Outdoor Foundation publishes other “special reports” as well as the Outdoor Recreation Participation Report, which is the largest and most comprehensive publication of its kind and provides information on more than 40 outdoor activities. This research provides an important long-run perspective on participation trends that the outdoor community faces on a day-to-day basis. With dramatic demographic and lifestyle changes taking place in the US and around the world, this information and analysis is more important than ever — informing and influencing critical outdoor programs, products, and public policy decisions.