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Promoting Activity Toolkit

screenshot of promotingactivity.com

The brief

NHS London were aware of the (then) upcoming Change4Life campaign and could see the fantastic potential it had for increasing levels of activity. They wanted to provide support to local organisations and individuals responsible for promoting activity (e.g. Sports Developments Officers, local councils, PCTs). There was a lack of understanding of what would be most effective for promoting activity to different groups.

NHS hired Make Sport Fun to identify what would be effective at promoting activity to the public, and produce resources which would be helpful to local activity groups to improve their promotion.

The original goal was to create resources which representatives from 70 organisations agreed would improve their activity promotion.

Our response to the brief

We started by working with NHS to hire the Henley Centre to do qualitative research into the barriers and motivations of different groups. This allowed us to develop insight into the most effective ways to promote activity to men and women of all ages. We then worked with copy writers to turn this insight into effective promotional messages. One of our findings was the importance of appropriate and high-quality photography in promoting activity and the lack of it available to people working in activity. We therefore worked with a fantastic photographer and with organisations which already had photos of their own to develop a library of over 1000 activity and sport photos. We also identified that many people working in promoting activity didn’t have the time or budget to produce Change4Life branded marketing materials, so we produced the Change4Life poster design tool which allows people to quickly produce Change4Life branded marketing materials.

Result

Instead of the original goal of 70 organisations using this site and finding it useful it has now been used by over 5,000 people with an 87% satisfaction rating.

Since we started working on this project it has also been funded by:

  • NHS East
  • NHS South East
  • NHS South West
  • NHS North West
  • NHS Yorkshire
  • NHS East Midlands
  • NHS West Midlands
  • Transport for London

Testimonial

“We know that whatever we offer, it has to be fun, easy and popular, or people won’t take part.  The Promoting Activity Toolkit is the key: you can use it to understand who lives in your patch, and what they need, and then put high-quality promotional materials together to make it happen – all in one place.  It takes the ‘hit or miss’ out of physical activity promotion”

-Paul Jarvis
South East Region Development Manager – Physical Activity