Promoting Sport blog

Get your website site noticed in search engines

Search engine optimisation is the phrase used to describe the process of obtaining a high natural search engine position for a website. Google optimisation is now viewed almost as important as the site design itself, if not more important.

Wii with the WI

Is it possible? Can playing video games, the ultimate pass-time of the couch potato, really help with your fitness? It seems that this one can.

Gwinear Parish Womens Insitute is the latest group to take up the Nintendo Wii challenge from Cornwall Sports Partnership (CSP).

Cornwall saw an opportunity to use the console with community groups and sports clubs and devised resource cards to accompany the Wii.

‘We devised the cards to compliment the console using heart rate monitors and stability balls -  turning the Wii into something that had a structured physical benefit to the user – the kids loved it and now we are using it in the community and workplace as a way of engaging adults to get involved in "virtual sport". We hope that this will be an introduction into taking up real sports like Tennis, Golf, Athletics etc’ – said Chris Hunkin from Cornwall Sports Partnership – who leads the Wii Project. They have already had interest from WI members wanting to take up the sports that they enjoyed on the Wii.

The CSP are working with the WI by introducing taster sessions with the Wii over the coming months with a view to holding a National WI Wii Championship in the Autumn.

Gwinear lady, Liz Davis, said: ‘What fun - I can’t believe the workout you get from a computer game. Its really quite challenging but if us ladies can do it anyone can!

This project has been getting national coverage. The Sun coverage can be seen here and on the Cornwall Sports Partnership website here.

If you more details on this project or want to take part in the National Wii with WI challenge in Autumn then register your interest with Vicki Gregory at vgregory@cornwall.gov.uk or on 01872 32 33 46.

Grow and promote your sports club

In order to survive and grow in an increasingly competitive market, sports clubs must find ways of attracting new members while retaining existing ones.

Through marketing you can achieve this, while it also helps you:

• Identify opportunities for growth and long term sustainability;
• Clearly communicate and raise awareness of exactly what your club has to offer;
• Become more visible and a hub within the community;
• Increase sponsorship and engage local businesses;
• Recruit volunteers.

The new Club section in the Promoting Sport Toolkit contains a club toolkit and how to guides to assist clubs with their marketing and promotion.

Usint the Six Nations to your advantage

I have to admit - I've been a little dissapointed by the performance of the England rugby team so far. However win, lose or draw people are more likely to want to get into a sport when there's a major competition going on.

You can use Go Play Rugby to get people playing rugby in your area. Put info up on your website, newsletters, and anywhere else you run any promotion to the public. People just need to enter their postcode on www.goplayrugby.com or text their postcode to 64411 and they'll get details of their local club.

It's simple and effective. 9000 people started playing rugby again during the World Cup as a result of this campaign.

If you want to do the same for other sports then why not promote the club finder tool at www.sportengland.org/getactive which has links to the club details for dozens of sports. Not all sports have this information available on the web, so please check it out before promoting it for a specific sport.

Testing a new online design tool

I'm building an online design tool to help sports clubs and community groups produce high quality promotional materials. It will be part of the Promoting Sport toolkit, and will use photos from the photo library.

Please can you take 3 minutes to feedback on the ease of use of this tool, and ask others (especially people from local sports clubs) to do the same.

Online design tool:   www.getsportnoticed.co.uk
Username:              user
Password:              password

Click Here to take survey

How to publish the sporting calendar to your web site

Why not improve your website with very little effort? If you'd like to add some automatically updated relevant content to your website then read on.

I've set up an RSS feed from the the National calendar of events run by James Ventham of Lancashire Sport Partnership.

In order to get the next 10 national sporting events as a list on your website just give the html code below to whoever runs your site for you. Wherever on your site they put it the list will appear - just like magic.

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/NationalSportingEventsCalendar?format=sigpro" type="text/javascript" ></script><noscript><p>Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/NationalSportingEventsCalendar"></a><br/>Powered by FeedBurner</p> </noscript>

If you want only 5 events instead of 10, or all events for the year, or in calendar format rather than as a list then just let me know and I'll tell you how to do that too.

New sporting year on the Promoting Sport Toolkit

It’s a big year for sport in 2008, with the obvious highlight being the Beijing Olympics which kicks-off on the 8^th of August.

Thanks to the Lancashire Sports Partnership, the Promoting Sport Toolkit has got it all covered with a comprehensive calendar of the big (and not so big) sporting events of 2008.

Thanks also to Sport England South East for some great new photos that can now be found on the photo library.  These include images of people taking part in bowls, tenpin bowling and orienteering.

If anyone has got anything they would like to share on the Toolkit, drop me an email.  chris.smith@uwe.ac.uk

Sporting Champions video

I've produced a short Sporting Champions video to show how it can help you to get young people playing sport.

Don't forget that anyone at all can book these free visits from elite athletes to help get young people playing sport. To see how visits work just watch the video above (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfyLQ_oL0sw if you can't see it).

If you want to book a visit call 0800 328 4903 and they'll give you the correct contact at your local County Sports Partnership. Alternatively visit www.sportingchampions.org.uk.

New developments on the Promoting Sport Toolkit

Want to learn how to use some basic marketing and promotional techniques to increase sports participation or your club's membership?

Check out the new How to guides for some for some simple steps to follow when choosing and implementing the most appropriate techniques for your club or organisation.

Subject areas include advertising, direct mail, branding, using the media, using technology and how to write a design brief.

Each section also includes examples of how others have used the particular techniques.

It is widely accepted now that traditional marketing techniques can influence behavioural change.  Commericial organisations have been using these for decades to get people to listen to their message and adopt their products and services voluntarily.  There is no reason why these same techniques cannot be successful in changing peoples' attitudes toward sport and physical activity.

The new How to guides have been designed so you can quickly and simply use some of these tradional techniques.

Communicating to the Sport England segments

Sport England's research department has released some fantastic segmentation work recently, which is fantastic news because segmentation is an essential element of any good marketing work.

In an ideal world we would market to everyone individually, however this is impractical. What often ends up happening instead is one communication to everybody, which normally only appeals to a small percentage of the population. Segmentation allows us to group together people who have something in common, in our case with relation to sport.

The best example of segmentation nowadays is Tesco who have used the information from the Tesco clubcard to dominate the market.

In order to help you use this information to market and promote sport better I have written these communication plans. I used the information from the pen portraits alongside a tool called TrueTouch from Experian to write . These specifically cover how to promote and market sport to each of the segments.