The Alberta centre for Active living in Canada have written a guide on how to promote physical activity. It includes two useful topics:
Some of the information in here is only relevant to Canada, but much of it is useful for anyone looking to do more work with businesses.
The Promoting Sport toolkit's photo library has now quadrupled in size. It has increased from 150 photos to over 650 photos following a recent photo shoot.
I will be organising future photo shoots, and looking to increase this library even further, so if you have ideas for sports, people or situations you'd like to see photos of, or even a photo library of your own that you'd be willing to share with others then just enter a comment in response to this post or email me at john.ainsworth@sportengland.org.
Sport England are running the Together for Sport conference over the next two days (27th and 28th June). On the second day there's going to be a communications section for the comms leads from the 49 County Sports Partnerships round England.
The agenda is going to be something like this:
I'll be leading the last part along with Jordan Russell - Sport England's regional communications manager for the North West region.
I'll feedback on the conference, and what's been helpful and interesting on Friday.
There is a model in social marketing called "Stages of Change". I won't bore you with the details, but it's very effective in helping you know what to do when helping people to change their behaviour.
It's not very intuitive as to how to use this model, so we're working with the Department of Health on putting together a workbook to help people go through the process more easily.
This approach was very effective in the LEAP (Local Exercise Activity Pilots) projects, and we're hoping to duplicate this success elsewhere through this workbook.
I'll update everyone when we have this signed off and let people know where they can get copies from.
Here's something I found on the Duct Tape Marketing blog which could help a lot of sports clubs to improve their website at almost no cost.
If you've ever wanted to easily publish a schedule of upcoming event, deadlines or even birthdays as a dynamic list rather than a calendar style page here's an RSS trick for you to use. (This can be done on a public or private page)
Using this formula produces a dynamically changing list of events that will run from first up to last, automatically drop events that have passed, and automatically bring in future events per your settings. Now, anyone with access to a web browser and your Google Calendar account can update and edit your events list.
SPARC (Sport and Recreation New Zealand) have been doing research into promoting volunteering in sport. Nine motivational segments, or mindsets, were identified, and different approaches to promotions and retention of volunteers were devised as a result.
The segments include 'Investors' - who are driven by achievement and success and 'Cultural norms' who are seeking group well being.
They found that although volunteering in New Zealand had postive associations, volunteering in sport didn't, and many volunteers felt disempowered and it was dull.
So what next?
SPARC have made some recommendations as to how this research should influence organisations approach to promoting volunteering in sport. For more information on SPARC's recommendations just read the full report on the Promoting Sport toolkit.
Solihull Active is a high-profile publicity campaign and branding exercise to reinforce health messages on physical activity. At the heart of the initiative is an online database of local leisure activities – www.solihull.gov.uk/activities.
This database allows people to find their local activities without having to trawl the internet, and provides the people running the campaign with a focal point of something to promote. For more detail read the guide about Solihull Active in the Promoting Sport toolkit.
Simon Starr from Sport Nottinghamshire has managed to build a relationship with the Nottinghamshire Evening Post, and they are now working in partnership on the Shape Up Notts campaign.
He says that the key factors to getting the local media on board are: · Making sure that the initial contact is positive · Following up with a Proposal that outlines the potential benefits to them · Brokering a personal working relationship with the Editor or senior journalist · Generating human interest stories (the beauty of this type of campaign is that it is fantastic for finding people who are happy to tell their story and the things that they’ve done) · Maintaining the momentum
For more information see his guide on how he did it.
The team in the Sport England West Midlands recently managed to get Phil "The Power" Taylor on board to help them with their campaigning.
This is obviously a bit of a coup, and helped them get lots of press.
I've been in touch with them to find out how they did it, and they've written up a guide for us.
Good luck getting help from celebrities in your area.
Here's one for those of you who are really into your research.
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international not-for-profit and independent organization, dedicated to making up-to-date, accurate information about the effects of healthcare readily available worldwide. It produces and disseminates systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of interventions.
I found out about it during my recent holiday to the USA, my cousin is an assistant professor in Occupational Therapy and part of her focus is on getting people to do more exercise. This is one of the resources she uses to keep up-to-date on the most effective interventions in her field.
It contains some good examples of how marketing and promotion has been used to create a behaviour change in the target audience. Unfortunately the examples of exercise promotion that it measured were not so effective as might be hoped for, but I think there’s still lots of useful information in here.
