Editorial Articles

Sport England and Facebook have entered into a partnership to help deliver a lasting Olympic legacy of more people playing more sport.

It’s the first long-term partnership between Facebook and a government or public body in the U.K. – and will use the social networking site’s unrivalled influence to bring people together around sport, and transform the way sports bodies reach out to the public in the run up to London 2012.

Sport England is committed to creating a world-leading community sport environment, and has set specific and measurable targets to achieve by 2012/13, one of which is one million people doing more sport. Facebook wants to give people the power to share information and make the world more open and connected. This partnership is about connecting people throughout the country to the opportunities available to them.

On average only 14% of people participating in sport in England do so as a member of a sports club of that sport. This means that most people participating have no links to that sport’s national governing body (NGB) or the support it can offer. Sport England’s partnership with Facebook is about developing the skills necessary within sports’ governing bodies to help them maximise the potential of social media to communicate with people interested in their sport.

By getting sport onto Facebook we can make it more visible to people, increasing their knowledge about sporting opportunities and building on the organic distribution of messages that occurs in Facebook. You will see in your Facebook newsfeed that your friend has just signed up to play badminton at your local sports centre or decided to go for a 5k run in the evening and you then have the opportunity to message them and say, “can I come along?”

Facebook also gives governing bodies the opportunity to promote specific events or initiatives that they may be running to get people active. As part of the partnership Facebook will match - pound for pound - promotion of sporting opportunities through their platform advertising. This, coupled with Facebook targeting tools, gives governing bodies the ability to reach a large proportion of the 86% of sports participants they aren’t currently talking to.

As part of being involved in the partnership, NGBs receive social media training. The training covers basic use of social media as well as case studies and good practice examples that allow the NGBs to see how social media can really work for our sector and also how they may be able to better communicate and promote their sport.

At the centre of the partnership is the Community Sport Hub, a package of bespoke Facebook applications that allow NGBs to aggregate information relevant to followers on their page as well as sharing other types of content. Sport England developed these with a third party developer and they have been designed to meet the needs of sporting organisations better than the tools currently available on Facebook.

The Community Sports Hub applications allow sports bodies to build themselves a hub for their sport. They create and maintain the main hub page drawing in users interested in their sport then sharing and signposting them to content or other pages on Facebook. With the NGB page as a hub for their sport, the Community Sports Hub applications enhance the ability for the NGB to distribute its message.

As with those already on Facebook, the Community Sports Hub applications allow users to share photos and videos. But unlike native Facebook applications, the NGB can actively push content to pages linked off its hub. This push function massively extends the reach of the NGBs from the extremes of those who are keen and have already “liked” the NGB down to those who take their sport less seriously and have just started to follow their local club on Facebook.

To help sports develop these communities on Facebook, pages set up as part of an NGB’s hub are eligible for £50 free Facebook advertising through the partnership. This allows them to market their new or even existing Facebook presence and, coupled with the targeting available through Facebook’s advert tool, it can start to generate engaged and interested local communities.

An initial pilot of this concept was run with British Universities & Colleges Sport (BUCS), the national body for higher education sport and 19 universities. BUCS’ main audience includes professional sports staff and directors of sport as well as athletic union presidents from the universities. Before they started using Facebook, they were able to email their database, around 450 entries strong, but now they can communicate directly with over 6,900 from their main Facebook page. Using the network, however, their reach extends to over 35,000 students.

So does this actually result in people doing sport? Yes, it does! During the pilot run by BUCS, opportunities to do sport were advertised and promoted over Facebook. These included have-a-go sessions at the start of university term and healthy campus initiatives as well as national leader boards for 5k run times and mass participation Santa runs. In all, over 12,000 people have done sport through the project.

So far, sport has only scratched the surface of this technology’s potential. At Sport England we’re constantly looking for other tools and technology that can be added to the Community Sports Hub. This is indeed a very exciting time for sport.

Thomas Godfrey
Commercial Director, Sport England