Arthur is a great friend of mine. He’s played rugby since he was young. He’s 27, 6 foot tall, well built and loves to drink. The ideal club rugby player.

Arthur grew up playing rugby in Kenya (side note: Kenyans love rugby – if you to go the international 7s match then the Kenyans make up half the audience – who knew?).

When he was 18 he went to university in the States. Again he played rugby – this time for the University team.

Later he moved to London to work as an investment banker (so ladies – he’s tall, very dark, handsome and rich too). Of course, when he came to London he wanted to play rugby here too. But where to play? I pointed him to the Go Play Rugby website, a sports marketing website where there’s a list of clubs. Did he go to one of these clubs? No. Why not? He didn’t know anyone there.

Who would want to go to a club where they didn’t know anyone. Where’s the fun in that?

Eventually he made friends with a guy at work who played rugby. So he went with him to play at that club. Now I don’t know if you’ve been to London, but it turns out it’s really big. Arthur lives in North West London. The club was in South London – 1 1/2 hours travel.

So – what have we learnt? Arthur wants to play rugby badly enough to travel for 1 1/2 hours. Each way. But not enough to turn up when he doesn’t know anyone. And eventually he gave up on that – 3 hours travelling to go to rugby practice is a real pain in the backside.

Now. Is Arthur a retiring young man? Does he suffer from chronic shyness? Is he afraid of strangers? No, no and no. He’s as outgoing, charming and affable a bloke as you could hope to meet. This is just how normal people feel about joining sports clubs.

And what’s so frustrating is that on GoPlayRugby.com he’d filled in the form so someone would contact him. But no-one ever did.

This is why our sports marketing addresses this barrier. People receive personalised communication about places where they can play. They then receive a phone call to find them the ideal club, group or class. We then let the club know that they’ll be coming. This introduction process means that 70% of people we talk to go to that club. This is what works. You can do it too.

To get him to join a club needed someone to get in touch with Arthur and welcome him down. It wouldn’t have taken a lot. An email, a letter, a phone call or a text. Anything from a local club saying “this is when we train, come and join us” would have been enough.

And what kind of story doesn’t have a happy ending. Arthur is now playing rugby at a local club in Chalk Farm.

When I was at secondary school it was rugby, hockey or cricket. And that was fine. I was ok.

Then when I was 14 my mate Tim McLeish and I found out that if you joined the cross-country team that you only had to to train for half an hour. We were sold.

And then something funny happened. Even though we’d only joined so that we didn’t have to train for so long we actually started enjoying it. Turns out I was good at running, and everybody likes doing things they’re good at. We started winning prizes. Our school was split into houses, and our house only had one trophy when I started school. And that trophy was from the janitors for the most broken windows. When I left they’d had to buy a new trophy cabinet.

Since then I’ve played a series of individual sports, but I still suck at football.

How is this helpful? A lot of people don’t want to “play sport” or “do activity”. They want to play football, or rugby, or go running, or lift weights, or something else completely. When you’re running your marketing you need to find out what someone wants to do so you can promote that activity to them.

If you want a copy of the form we use for data collection at events, or when we run a direct mail campaign, then email me (john@makesportfun.com) and ask me for a copy.

Interesting.

Time has long been held as an important consideration as to when to press the send button for your email campaign. There are many blogs and discussions about timing and when the right time to send is, should it be before 9am or at lunch time or…?

However the time of day may not be as critical to you as is often suggested. Let me illustrate with three real life examples.

• In time of day testing for an online specialist travel company the time of day was found to be totally unimportant. Of note was there was a particular day of the week that gave a better response.

• A deals type campaign showed no difference in response from late morning delivery to late afternoon. In this case sends early morning and early evening were not tested.

• A news headlines email of a major newspaper normally sent by 8.30am was due to user error dispatched three hours later than normal. The open and click response from this late send was within the normal variance of this daily email.

• set up to attract followers not friends (so you don’t see details of participants private lives that you shouldn’t know about.
• set the appropriate privacy settings on your own Facebook
• don’t accept follower/friend request from under 13s.

They also suggested we should all disable the Google search option on our private Facebook accounts. This stops details of our private lives from being found via Google.

The NSPCC have produced some guidelines on ‘using social networking services and social media: promoting safe and responsible use’ which explains this and other steps you can follow in more detail.

If you’d like to know more about our social media workshops then email me at john@makesportfun.com or call me on 07776 103 785.

John Gruber in Cutting That Cord

Rachel (my sister) was organising a night of music for charity and at my brother’s birthday dinner she kept talking about Luke and his amazing guitar skills. Her boyfriend, who also plays the guitar and who was sat next to her at the time, wasn’t best pleased.

Over the dinner we joked about how Luke was clearly the most amazing man in the universe. He balances, he weaves, he dodges, he frolics, and his bills are all paid on time. He manages time efficiently. Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, he once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious army ants. He doesn’t sweat, and young children trust him. He can cook meals using nothing but a pack of flour and half a tin of anchovies that make gourmet chefs cry and promise to be better people. He once played Ronnie O’Sullivan at snooker, Ronnie only potted two balls. And one of them was the white.

Except he’s not. He’s fat and clumsy looking.

When I met him I was hugely disappointed.

You’re going to feel this way in in September 2012 once the Olympics are done. When it turns out that the legacy was a lie. And I want you to be prepared.

When the Olympics come chubby children will not leap into action and become athletic overnight. Overweight pensioners will not become filled with a new vitality and lose half their body weight. Sports clubs will not become filled with hundreds of excited, motivated members. There will not be a legacy.

Try not to be disappointed.

If you agree or disagree then please leave a comment below.

More information

• Want to achieve an Olympic legacy? Learn how to increase participation.
• Learn 3 practical fitness marketing ideas.

Before running up and down the hills of Sheffield for 26 miles I had spent 6 years running in cross-country teams. I didn’t win races, but I was pretty good.

I tell you this so you’ll understand that when I was terrified about joining an athletics club it wasn’t because I can’t run.

So why was I terrified?

Well, I was just recovering from 6 months off running with an ankle injury (football is dangerous) and I thought they’d probably all be rude to a newcomer, especially if I was slower than them.

I joined anyway. You might be expecting that I was pleasantly surprised at how friendly they all were. This was not the case. I was spot on. When you join a sports club people are generally rude to beginners who aren’t any good.

I’m sure this isn’t the case in any classes or clubs that you run, but it is the normal. I’ve played a lot of sports, and joined a lot of sports clubs, and nearly all of them are stand off-ish and a bit rude to newcomers until they can prove they’re any good, or somehow break into the clique.

This is not a sob story, by the way. I’m fine (apart from the ankle – that still hurts). But I want you to understand what you’re asking people to do when you ask them to join a sports club. This is why doing a flyer drop rarely gets a high response rate, and why I run sports marketing campaigns using the 4-stage approach.

If you’d like to learn more about why flyers on their own don’t work then email me (john@makesportfun.com) and I’ll send you a useful report into what barriers stop people from starting activity.