On 4th October I ran two workshops at East on the Move 3  in CenterParcs (the East region’s annual conference). It was an excellently run conference with great feedback.

“Thank you for a great day, i found it very useful and took away with me lots of inspiration”
Loren, Bedfordshire.

“One of the best conferences i have ever been to (including USA conferences)”
- Deborah, Norfolk.

Nick Clarke from Active Norfolk was organising the conference, and he got in touch to ask if I’d deliver the Top 10 ways to increase participation workshop twice – once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I was obviously delighted to be involved with such a great conference.

This workshop is based on dozens of research reports, dozens of case studies of effective activity marketing campaigns and millions of pounds of research data. In it I covered:

• What millions of pounds of research have found to be the top 10 ways to increase participation
• The 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign
• How www.promotingactivity.com can help you plan and run your activity marketing

It was a shorter version of the full workshop, as we only had an hour instead of the normal 2 hours.

Feedback was positive, with 80% of people gave it a satisfied or very satisfied rating.

“The workshop delivered offered a selection of ideas and projects that work in those hard to reach areas, feedback from the workshop has been great.”

Nick Clarke, Physical Activity and Health Improvement Coordinator, Active Norfolk

If you’re interested in setting up this workshop for a conference or any other marketing training then please visit the training page on our website, call me on 020 3239 8824 or email me at john@makesportfun.com.

Lexi Fergus at NHS Greenwich was using Mailchimp for her email marketing and was getting frustrated with it. She decided to have a look at our email marketing tool and got in touch with me.

I explained that we’ve developed our email marketing tool to be much simpler to use than others so that there’s no learning curve for it. She decided to go ahead with making the switch. We then worked together to agree a brief on what she wanted her email marketing template to look like, what parts should be editable and what parts should be fixed.

Once that was agreed we created a first draft design. This was based on the existing design on their new website and on their branding guidelines. We didn’t manage to hit the nail on the head with the first draft of the design, so we discussed what the problems were, made some changes, and kept doing that until Lexi was happy with the design. We then built the design, uploaded it to our email marketing tool and tested it in all major email systems (e.g. Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) to make sure it looked the same in all those systems. I then helped Lexi to link the correct email marketing lists in the email marketing tool with the sign up form on their website.

“Make Sport Fun listened to our needs and worked with us until we got it right!”

Alexia Fergus, NHS Greenwich

If you send an email newsletter or are thinking about it then get in touch to find out how our email marketing tool can make your life easier and your email newsletters more beautiful.

I’ve just run a marketing workshop for BADMINTON England‘s London and South East regions. I’m a huge fan of BADMINTON England and the great work they’re doing with Back to Badminton and No Strings Badminton. So when Paul Bickerton (London regional manager) got in touch with me I was delighted to be involved. Paul decided to get in touch following a marketing workshop I ran for Jenny Phipps in BADMINTON England’s South West region. Together we planned out what would be most useful to cover in the workshop.

The topics we decided on were:

• Brief explanation of the Sport England segmentation
• The 4 stages of an effective activity marketing campaign
• How I would market the Badders in the City programme
• More detail for how I would use each suggested tactic, and how they could do that themselves
• Know stage
• Facebook and 4 ways to use it to promote your courses
• Twitter and a way to use that to promote your courses
• Google Ads
• How to get more referrals from your existing participants and from partners
• Leaflets and how to make them more effective
• Partners
• Email shot
• Why Groupon might not be worth bothering with
• Link stage
• How to improve the conversion rate of the landing page
• How to best follow up with interested people
• Improve registration system
• SMS reminders
• How to track all your contacts

I planned out the workshop over the next couple of weeks. I used parts of previous workshops that I’ve run for other workshops round the country, and then I tweaked it all to match exactly with their needs.

The workshop was a success and we had tons of input and ideas from everyone in the group. There were 11 people from BADMINTON England at the session which is a great size for a workshop.Today’s workshop is obviously just the beginning and the hard work to improve their marketing starts now. I’m hoping to work with the London region some more and help them implement some of the ideas from today’s session.

“John delivered exactly the session that we were hoping for, and pitched it at just the right level.
The most useful part of the training was that John had related it directly to our work by analysing
and integrating one of our key projects into the session, using it as a case study and making
suggestions for improvement. It’s also important to ask plenty of questions in the workshop, as that really helps draw on John’s experience and knowledge.”

 Paul Bickerton, Regional Manager – London, BADMINTON England