CASE STUDY: ENGLAND NETBALL – USING INSIGHT TO DRIVE PARTICIPATION
T
he Active People Survey (APS) shows that netball participation has grown by 18 per cent over
the last five years, partly due to the success of programmes such as England Netball’s Back to Netball. This hasn’t happened by chance, but is built on the commitment the governing body has shown to putting their participants at the heart of everything they do – the Participant-Centred Approach. Over the last 18 months, England
According to APS data, the number of people cycling regularly in 2010/11 grew by 126,400 since 2005/6
4.24 million, women’s participation has failed to keep pace. It’s clear from this that more needs to be done to make sport attractive to women.
SPORT BY SPORT With six years data to look at, what do we know about the relative popularity of different sports? Sport England measures the sports it funds on the number of people who are playing the sport at least once a week for 30 minutes. Among team sports, the picture in
2010/11 looks similar to six years ago; football remains far out in front with over 2.1 million weekly participants, fol- lowed by cricket, rugby union, basketball and netball. The most likely change to
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Netball has undertaken a huge project to identify the behaviours, motiva- tions, expectations, capabilities and needs of current netballers and poten- tial future participants to help shape their offers, programmes and struc- tures. They have combined information from a wide range of surveys, audits, questionnaires, in-depth interviews and recorded conversations. Through The Big Netball Conversation, the governing body has talked directly to nearly 10,000 netballers.
that order appears to be among the fi- nal two, with netball showing a positive trend and basketball flagging, particu- larly in the last two years of APS figures. But overall the popularity of these team sports has remained relatively constant over the period. The picture for individual sports is
much more dynamic. Participation in cycling and athletics (which includes run- ning) has increased by around 125,000 and 550,000 respectively, while swim- ming is down by around 460,000 over the six-year period. However, swim- ming remains comfortably the most popular sport with around 2.8 mil- lion weekly participants. Inevitably the changes in numbers of participants are
Data and insight derived from the
APS has been a key component of this process. It has particularly supported understanding of the large number of participants accessing netball activities outside the sport’s traditional struc- tures. While England Netball has a membership of just over 50,000 adult members, more than 130,000 on aver- age play netball once a week. The customer-centred understand-
ing is already driving the development of the ‘My Game’ portfolio of offers for current and potential netball players aimed at offering a game and product of choice for any participant and it will underpin the continuing evolution of England Netball’s strategic plan. The sport will also be continu- ing to talk to participants and building understanding of their needs as new data emerges – as with all success- ful organisations, the path to success starts and ends with understanding their customers.
largest among the bigger sports, but proportionately there has been some very impressive growth in some slightly smaller sports, notably table tennis and mountaineering.
INCREASING PARTICIPATION IN A CHALLENGING ECONOMIC CLIMATE So what impact is the challenging eco- nomic situation having on people’s sports participation? Taking part in sport is a leisure choice
involving discretionary spend. If an indi- vidual’s budget tightens, they will have lower discretionary spend. But do people stop playing sport altogether or do they protect their active lifestyle by switching to lower cost activities?
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