INSIGHT
LISA O’KEEFE, DIRECTOR OF INSIGHT, SPORT ENGLAND
Do we really understand what young people want from sport?
Young people are becoming an increasingly mature and demanding market in grassroots sport, writes Sport England director of insight Lisa O’Keefe – but there are plenty of opportunities to engage them
S
ports practitioners are increasingly turning to the insights derived from high- quality data and research to find new and creative ways of
getting people active. Crucially, insight is now being used in boardrooms to lead investment decisions and identify the best methods to measure impact. The value of insight to community sport
is becoming more widely recognised and is inspiring change. This is certainly the case at Sport England, where I lead the relatively new Insight Team. We’re tasked with building a deeper understanding of people’s attitudes and behaviours to develop both our thinking and that of community sport. We use information and insight in a way that drives change – translating insights into actionable business recommendations. The importance of insight is highligted
sporting habits as they travel through life. To start to understand what drives these patterns of behaviour and how to change them, it’s important to understand the current generation of young people, as their environment is so different from the one many of us experienced at their age. We recently published the findings
Jennie Price, Sport England CEO (left) and Lisa O’Keefe, director of insight
when you consider that, as an organisation, Sport England will invest more than £400m into the 46 national governing bodies between 2013 and 2017.
Graph 1: Young people’s attitudes to sport Positive
Consistently active
Functional Uninterested 20% 30% Irregular 15%
Consistently inactive
38 15%
The challenge of participation One of our early pieces of work has been to draw together a picture of the key forces shaping the lives of young people today and, importantly, what that means for community sport. Although the number of people playing sport once a week continues to grow and now stands at 15.6 million, participation among 14- to 25-year- olds has remained stubbornly flat since 2008. Looking deeper, this overall trend masks a significant volatility – with a large number of young people continuing to form, and then break,
20%
of our review and many of the insights challenge some of grassroots sport’s most established thinking. Analysing a wide range of existing data and research, as well as commissioning new field work talking directly to young
people, we discovered the following: ■ Young people’s behaviour does not always reflect their attitude to sport. Sport has previously looked at young people’s engagement with sport too much through its own lens. Seen this way, it has been assumed that attitudes and behaviours tend to be linked and growth will result from just changing the offer to tap into the large number of “semi-sporty” young people waiting to take part in sport. In reality, the picture is more complex than simply loving or hating sport. Behaviours can vary from month
to month and, crucially, attitudes and behaviours do not always align. By that I mean that young people who are positive about sport aren’t necessarily actively looking to take part. Indeed, some disinterested young people actually find reasons to be far more active than those with a positive attitude towards sport. Add this to the fact that, for some young people, the word ‘sport’ itself has very negative connotations and you start to get a sense of the complex nature of the youth market. We need to focus on changing behaviours and not attitudes as we previously thought.
sportsmanagement.co.uk issue 4 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
SPORTING BEHAVIOUR
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92