Reach 2 million parents looking for splash pads
A sober, self-serve sponsorship kit for parks-equipment OEMs, family brands, and tourism boards. What we offer, who we reach, what we won't do, and how the editorial firewall is enforced. No pricing list — every conversation starts with fit.
Direct answer
SplashPadHub reaches roughly two million unique parents and family planners during peak summer (May through August), most of them on mobile and most actively planning a same-week or same-day visit. Sponsorship works through clearly labeled editorial features, newsletter placements, state-guide co-promotion, custom data studies, and a forthcoming podcast — never through pop-ups, interstitials, or pay-to-play rankings. Editorial decisions stay with our editorial team. Sponsors are named publicly, and every placement carries a visible sponsored tag.
Audience snapshot
SplashPadHub is a peak-season audience built around a single, time-bound family decision: where the kids cool off this weekend. At the height of the season we serve roughly two million unique monthly visitors across the public site, the planner, the national map, the state guides, and the newsletter. Traffic compresses into a four-month window — May through August — with smaller shoulders in April and September for Sun Belt states whose seasons run longer. The shape is unmistakably summer: a steep ramp around Memorial Day, a plateau through July, and a measured decline through Labor Day.
Roughly seventy percent or more of our audience are parents or caregivers responsible for at least one child under twelve. The remainder skews toward grandparents, aunts and uncles, family travel planners, and a long tail of professionals — parks staff, journalists, urban planners, accessibility advocates — who use the site for reference rather than recreation. Geo concentration tracks heat exposure, not population: Texas, Florida, California, Arizona, and Georgia are persistent leaders, with North Carolina, Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania rounding out the top ten.
The audience is mobile-first by a wide margin. Roughly seventy-eight percent of sessions arrive on a phone, often with location services on, often within an hour of an actual visit. That posture shapes how we design — fast pages, large tap targets, no interstitials — and it shapes how we think about sponsorships, which have to respect a parent who is mid-plan with a wet swimsuit in the backseat.
Sponsorship formats
Five formats today, none of them intrusive. No pop-ups, no floor ads, no interstitials, no programmatic retargeting — those formats are categorically off the table.
Sponsored editorial
Long-form articles produced by our editorial team to our standards on a topic relevant to a sponsor's category — surfacing safety, accessibility hardware, season-extension strategies, water-saving controllers. Sponsorship is disclosed at the top of the page with a visible sponsored tag and again in the footer. The sponsor never reviews editorial calls, never edits the conclusions, and never sees the underlying data we collect from readers.
Newsletter sponsorship
A single sponsor slot in the weekly digest sent to parents and family planners during the peak season. The slot is clearly labeled, sits below the lead editorial, and renders as text-and-image rather than a banner. We do not run multiple sponsors in a single issue and we do not sell the lead position. Cadence and scheduling are decided by the editorial calendar, not by sponsor demand.
State guide co-promotion
Footer-only co-promotion on a single state guide for a finite window — for example, an Arizona splash-pad guide co-promoted with a sunscreen brand for the Memorial-Day-to-Labor-Day window. The co-promo lives in the footer, not the header, never rearranges the editorial body, and never influences which pads are listed or how they rank. Geo-targetable to a single state or a regional cluster.
Custom data study
A bespoke research project produced by our editorial team using our verified directory plus any public data the sponsor's category requires — accessibility benchmarks, season-window analyses, equipment-feature distributions, regional growth curves. The sponsor commissions the study and is named at the top; the methodology, conclusions, and any caveats are ours. Reports publish under CC BY 4.0 so the field can cite them.
Audio (podcast forthcoming)
A podcast on family-summer infrastructure is in production for the 2027 season. Sponsorship will be host-read, single-sponsor-per-episode, with disclosure at the top of every episode and in the show notes. Topics will run parallel to our editorial beats: parks departments, equipment manufacturers, accessibility, climate adaptation, and family travel. No programmatic ad insertion — every read is reviewed editorially.
What we won't do
Trust is worth more to us than revenue. The lines below are non-negotiable, and we hold them even when it costs a deal. The full editorial firewall is documented on /methodology.
- Pay-to-play rankings. No tier on this page or any other buys better placement, a higher position in a best-of guide, a custom pin color on the national map, or a mention in a category guide. Rankings come from our published methodology, full stop. If a prospective sponsor opens a conversation by asking about ranking influence, we end the conversation.
- Undisclosed sponsorships. Every sponsored placement carries a visible sponsored tag at the top of the page, in the footer of the email, and again in the byline area where applicable. Sponsors are also named publicly on /sponsors with their tier, so a reader or AI agent can audit our financial relationships in one place. We follow FTC disclosure guidance as a floor, not a ceiling.
- Exclusive content lockouts. We do not grant any sponsor exclusive rights over a category, a region, a topic, or a piece of editorial real estate. A sunscreen brand cannot purchase the only mention in a sun-protection guide. A municipality cannot purchase the only voice in a regional report. Open-web access is the product, and exclusivity would corrode it.
- Intrusive ad formats. No pop-ups, no interstitials, no floor ads, no auto-play video, no programmatic banners, no pixel-tracked retargeting on the public site. The audience is a parent mid-plan with one hand on a phone and one hand on a child. Anything that gets in the way of the actual answer is incompatible with how we operate.
Editorial standards
Every sponsorship is clearly labeled. Sponsored editorial carries a sponsored tag at the top of the page, repeated near the byline and in the footer. Newsletter slots carry a sponsored label in the slot itself. State-guide co-promotions render in a visually separated footer block. There is no design choice on the site that allows a sponsor to be confused with editorial.
Sponsors get separate visual treatment. Sponsored modules use a different background tone, a different rule, and an explicit attribution line — they are not designed to blend with editorial. The brand association we sell sponsors is association with our standards, not camouflage inside them.
Editorial calls stay with the editorial team. A sponsor never reviews a sponsored piece before publication, never edits conclusions, never sees the data collected from readers, and never decides which pads are featured or how they rank. Conversations about future projects happen on a separate track from editorial planning, with documented separation between the two.
When a sponsor and an editorial finding conflict, the editorial finding wins. If a sponsored research project surfaces an inconvenient conclusion for the sponsor's category, we publish the finding and disclose the sponsorship. If a sponsor objects, we offer to refund the sponsorship rather than alter the finding. The editorial firewall is described in detail on /methodology.
Audience by state
The top ten states by traffic. Geo concentration tracks climate-driven splash-pad usage, not raw population — small Sun Belt states punch above their population weight, and a few northern industrial-Midwest states sustain volume through dense municipal park programs.
- #1TexasLong season, dense Sun Belt traffic, high mobile share.
- #2FloridaYear-round usage in southern metros, strong tourism overlap.
- #3CaliforniaInland heat plus dense parks systems drive high page volume.
- #4GeorgiaAtlanta metro plus Coastal Plain push consistent peak-season traffic.
- #5ArizonaHighest per-capita splash-pad usage outside Texas; long season.
- #6North CarolinaTriangle and Charlotte metros plus climate-driven growth in older municipal pads.
- #7OhioIndustrial-Midwest density, strong municipal parks programs, founder-state for the directory.
- #8IllinoisChicago metro plus a long ring of suburban park districts produce high session volume.
- #9New YorkFive-borough volume plus upstate municipal coverage.
- #10PennsylvaniaPhiladelphia and Pittsburgh metros anchor a high-density Northeast corridor share.
Production timeline
Lead time
Plan on a four-to-six-week lead time from first conversation to live placement. Custom data studies and editorial features sit at the longer end; newsletter slots and state-guide co-promotions sit at the shorter end. Peak-season placements (Memorial Day through Labor Day) book first and we recommend opening conversations no later than mid-March.
Editorial review
Sponsored editorial passes through two or three rounds of internal editorial review before publication: a methodology review, a draft review, and a fact-and-disclosure pass. Sponsors see the disclosure language and the structural outline; they do not see drafts of editorial conclusions. We provide a final-state preview shortly before publication for date-and-name accuracy only.
Cancel-anytime clause
Every sponsorship agreement carries a cancel-anytime clause for either party. If the sponsor needs to pull out before publication, we refund any unused fees. If we discover a conflict that would compromise editorial independence, we cancel and refund. Either side can walk for any reason or no reason; the contract reflects that.
Renewals
Renewal conversations open at least thirty days before the end of an active term. We do not auto-renew sponsorships and we do not lock in multi-year terms by default. Single-season renewals are common; multi-year arrangements are possible only with a documented editorial firewall and an explicit non-exclusivity clause.
What sponsors actually get
The honest answer to the value question. Not impressions in the abstract — the four things on this page are what the sponsorship is actually buying.
Brand association with verified data
Sponsors are associated with the only national splash-pad directory built to citation-grade standards: documented sources, three-pass verification, public changelog, open data under CC BY 4.0. That association is what we sell; it cannot be bought from anyone else, because nobody else has built it.
A parent audience that converts on family decisions
The audience is in the act of making a family decision when they reach us — where to spend the afternoon, what to pack, whether the pad is open, whether it is accessible. That decisional posture is dramatically more valuable than a generic impression on a generic ad network, and it does not exist anywhere else in the splash-pad category.
Share of voice in an uncontested category
Splash pads have no dominant national publisher, no incumbent affiliate network, and no established editorial brand. A sponsor entering the category through SplashPadHub is buying share of voice in a space without a dominant player — a position that is meaningfully harder to hold once the category matures.
Evergreen longevity
Every page on the site is evergreen and every sponsored placement is ranked in our internal coverage like the rest of the directory. A sponsorship that publishes in May still earns reads in October, and a state-guide co-promo that ships in June still appears in search results next summer. The economics compound; they do not expire with the campaign.
First conversation
Send a short note describing your organization, the format you have in mind, your target window, and any geo or category constraints. A real person reads every email. We typically reply within one to two business days, and the first conversation is a fit check — not a sales call.
Email partnerships@splashpadhub.com. If you are press or a journalist working on a story, see /press-release for assets and quotes instead.
Email partnerships@splashpadhub.comRelated pages
- /partners — institutional partnerships, data syndication, co-marketing
- /methodology — editorial firewall, source priority, verification passes
- /trust — funding, conflicts of interest, disclosure policy
- /press-kit — logos, brand assets, fact sheet, pull-quotes
- /sponsors — current named sponsors and tier overview
- /press-release — press contact, embargoed assets, quotes