Marketing campaigns and training for sport and activity.
There are 3 fundamental principles to increasing participation in sport and activity. We have to make it fun, easy and popular.
Outdoor gyms are a great way of making activity easier. Companies like The Great Outdoor Gym Company have been installing these gyms around the country and making it easier for people to get active.
Despite having run a range of GP referral physical activity programmes, linked to weight-management, cardio rehabilitation and diabetes, Blackburn with Darwen still had some of the lowest sport and physical activity participation rates in the North West, according to Sport England’s Active People survey.
This, combined with high smoking rates, a prevalence of mental health problems, and low life expectancy, convinced the local authority and primary care trust that a radical solution was needed.
In 2007, the council launched re:fresh in partnership with local health organisations and the primary care trust.
It began with an awareness campaign that ran in the media, online and in public buildings. Called ‘Killer Facts’ the campaign was designed to help local people confront their potential health problems.
Longer-term, the emphasis, however, was not on concerning people about their health but on supporting them to make healthier choices by connecting them to their local leisure centre, encouraging them to take part in healthy activities such as cycling, walking and tennis, and working with local communities in the five neighbourhood areas to help them develop their own activities.
At the heart of the programme were free sessions at the council’s five leisure centres, introduced incrementally by age group, starting with the over-fifties. From September 2008, 16-24 year-olds were added, with 25-49 year olds the following April.
Participants said the initial health message got them interested in taking part, but it was the social and emotional benefits of sport and physical activity that kept them going.
Judith Scott from Freedom Leisure asked me to run two segmentation workshops for them recently.
I developed these based on our existing segmentation workshop, and tweaked each of them based on Freedom Leisure’s needs.
The first workshop was for the central marketing team, who were already very competent in marketing techniques and were aware of the importance and the uses of segmentation. So with this team I focussed on a wide variety of case studies and some advanced techniques around choosing which segments to focus on and what to offer them.
The second workshop was for people responsible for marketing at their leisure centres. For this group I made the workshop more focussed on understanding how to choose a target segment then how to use the marketing plans to help with practically writing headlines, choosing media and implementing marketing techniques.
Both workshops got good feedback. The first received a score of 9.4 out of 10, and the second was not tracked using our system but got a very positive response.
Judith Scott, PR and Marketing Executive, Freedom Leisure
The proportion of clubs experiencing growth in their adult membership levels has declined 6% since 2008.
In terms of adult membership, more than one in four (28%) of clubs are experiencing growth whilst 15% are contracting in
terms of adult membership numbers. On balance, at an overall level, this represents growth in 13% of clubs. In 2008, a
higher proportion of clubs (34%) were growing and slightly fewer (13%) were contracting, resulting in a slightly higher overall level of
growth in 21% of clubs. This slowdown is indicative of the already identified difficulties which clubs have faced in the last
two to three years in recruiting and retaining members.
There is, of course, considerable variation across sports, with no evidence of contraction at all amongst athletics and cycling clubs, reflecting a current trend for the increasing popularity of more individualised sports.