Active Ealing are the sports and physical activity team at Ealing Council. Below we describe how they used promotingactivity.com to support their funding bid.
The Active Ealing team at Ealing Council recently applied to Pro-Active West London for a share of the funds made available through the London Development Agency’s Play Sport London programme. The money was used to launch Staying Active sessions for older adults at the new Northolt Leisure Centre, which opened at the end of January.
The team’s intention was to deliver an enjoyable and accessible exercise programme for older adults within the area and to raise awareness of the new facility in Northolt, with a view to it becoming a hub of the community and hosting ongoing sessions for older people throughout the year. The idea was to offer heavily subsidised free sessions that would appeal to older residents and that would offer a good opportunity not just for exercise but also for social interaction and making new friends.
Sessions were offered during February and March 2010 in a variety of sports and activities – these included supervised gym sessions, swimming sessions, aqua aerobics, group exercises, table tennis and indoor bowls. The team used the toolkits on promotingactivity.com to help identify their target markets and as part of developing an effective marketing programme.
“The toolkits were tremendously helpful,” says Active Ealing Sports Development Officer Peter Clarke, “firstly they helped us target the groups we wanted to help with our activity programme but it was also great in helping us to prepare our marketing materials effectively. The message was that the people we were targeting would respond well to a visual approach with simple messages and clarity of writing, so this was something we really concentrated on with the posters and materials we used to promote the sessions. It was great to know that we were using proven methods with regards to marketing”
“It certainly seemed to work as we had a huge response and the activities have been a great success. 90% of the activities we initially offered are still running and are very well attended. We are very happy in that not only have we got lots of people using the new leisure facility but have also achieved a significant boost in the number of older people getting back into exercise within the area.”
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