Data can bring the sport sector together - and grow it, for all of our benefit

At London Sport, when we talk about data, we spend a lot of time talking about how our world could and should learn from the retail sector. The topic has come up again repeatedly around the office after the collapse of two high street mainstays, in BHS and Austin Reed, in the past weeks. The fact is that the world is changing fast, and any business needs to adapt or face extinction; our world should not feel it is immune. 

Today, physical activity and sport are facing intense competition for people’s leisure time and money, mainly from a range of more sedentary leisure activities that have identified and tapped directly into the ways in which consumer behave. Want to buy a cinema ticket? Three clicks and your seat’s waiting for you. Craving for takeaway? The only part of picking up your phone is the bit where you can search, place your order and see exactly how close your dinner is with nothing more than your thumbprint. Want to go and play a game of badminton? Not so simple.

The single biggest advantage that other leisure activity sectors maintain over physical activity and sport is the adoption of modern technology and data principles in engaging their core and prospective consumer. Here, ultimately, is the crux of the challenge our sector faces.

Too often, we think of one another as competition - rugby competing with football; London competing with Surrey; parkrun competing with athletics clubs – and that sense of competition risks blinding us to our real competitors: the activities consumers are choosing to take part in, instead of physical activity and sport. Instead of competing for ever smaller slices of the same group – regularly active participants – it’s time that we took a collective approach to growing the market as a whole. More consumers, meaning higher participation levels, meaning more positive societal outcomes from physical activity and sport. The quickest and cheapest way to make it happen? A sector-wide commitment to sharing data.

By pooling our different data we can achieve two things: know infinitely more about our ‘customers’; and make it easier for them to find and book the right activity for them.

Firstly, how do we use data to know more about people? Big Data is not new. All of us have data on people, which can tell us a little bit on its own. But by combining it with others’ – anonymously, negating any risk to individuals’ privacy – we can start to get a real understanding of trends and correlations among those who play sport, and those who don’t. Then throw in other sources such as health records, travel information, internet browsing habits, marriage and birth records – all of which are readily available – and we’ll find out things we never even imagined to help us create and market new activities far more effectively and efficiently. This is standard issue in successful retail companies, yet appears light years away in our world.

How do we make it easier for them to find activities? By opening up our ‘opportunity data’ (things someone can take part in), we can push them to multiple websites for the consumer to access, and book them. Again, this is not innovation. Try to book a hotel and you’ll see this in operation already.

That’s why London Sport is a founding partner in the Openactive movement – an Open Data community chaired by the Open Data Institute and imin designed to make it easier for consumers to find the right physical activity or sport for them, just as they would expect to find the right film, the right takeaway, or the right holiday at the touch of a few buttons. Simply put, link up your booking system or even Excel spreadsheet to Openactive and have your sessions pushed to a network of websites instantly. Data in once, multiple marketing routes.

As a sector, we are playing catch up. The travel, hospitality and e-commerce sectors have been reaping the benefit of better use of data for years. In our favour, though, is that the model is already there, tried and tested for us to use. To spark a national revolution in the growth of participation no innovation is required; just collaboration.

There is no better time, and few better ways, for the sector to join together than now and through the power of data. We have a choice: to be a Woolworths, or to be an Argos. To be left behind, or adapt and strike ahead.

Our choice must be clear.

To find out more about opportunities to be involved in Openactive and the open data programme, contact London Sport on info@londonsport.org

Read more about technology and insight as part of the Alliance's Technology and Insight month here.

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