Promoting Sport blog

Sporting Champions

Sporting Champions are a Sport England initiative, which brings world-class athletes face-to-face with young people to inspire and motivate them to participate in sport.

Their main goal is to show young people that sport can and should be fun, and to sow the seeds which start a lifelong enjoyment of physical activity.

There are only 200 general visits available so  they do require a visit code, which you can ask your local County Sports Partnership. More information on how they decide whether to allocate a visit can be found on the the Sporting Champions page of the Promoting Sport toolkit. If you get a code from your local County Sports Partnership, then you can also book the visit via the Sporting Champions page.

If you have any problems or ideas on how to make this process simpler then please email me at john.ainsworth@sportengland.org or leave a comment below.

Why people do sport

I wrote a post a few weeks ago on why people do exercise, and that the main reasons aren't about health.

I've been looking through some more research recently, and came across some more statistics on why people do sport.

• 39% of people do sport to just enjoy it
• 30% of people do sport to keep fit
• 10% to take the children
• 8% to meet with friends

These results are from the Department of Media, Culture and Sport's Taking Part survey. Obviously this only scrapes the surface, as we could split up what people mean by just enjoying it, and which people do it for the different reasons. These are all things that our research team is working on as part of the segmentation project, and which should be available later this year.

What does this practically mean for you and me? I think it means that we shouldn't focus on health when we're promoting sport because that's not what they're interested in (on the whole). We should focus on what people already enjoy about it.

Improved health is a government target, in much the same way that making a profit is Marks and Spencer's target. That doesn't mean that M&S's adverts should say "Buy our peas wo we can make a profit"; they say (in not so many words) "Buy our peas because they're damn tasty."

If you want to know more about how to promote to different groups you can visit the Promoting Sport toolkit's How to Guides section and look at how to promote sport to different people.

Promoting Sport toolkit officially launched

After two months of testing we've formally launched the Promoting Sport toolkit.

I've substantially improved the photo library, so it's much easier to use and has high-res images for all photography.

I've also put better keywording on the images, so they should be easier to search.

Early feedback has been very positive, with 70% of people saying they thought it was good or very good.

In fact, according to Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire Sport:

"The new Promoting Sport Toolkit is a fantastic resource and makes promoting sport easier. We’re particularly impressed with the extensive photo library and 'How To Guides', which will prove useful for our local sports clubs and will help us to drive up participation."

I've got lots of thoughts and ideas about what to do next in order to improve the toolkit further - but if you've got ideas why not let me know in the comments section or on the toolkit's discussion forum.