What’s happening in the Sport Sector?
Sports participation is widely recognised as providing a range of benefits to those who take part. As such, participation is encouraged by the Scottish Government, schools and governing bodies delivering better health and fitness, often a team ethos, and many other social benefits across all sectors of society. These messages are compelling – but they are fighting an increasingly difficult battle, especially amongst our children and teenagers who are often more attracted by more sedentary activities such as gaming and social media. And of course, sports are competing against each other for the limited leisure time available. So how can different sports stand out – at 56 Degree Insight we have the experience to help identify appropriate strategies for growth.
And of course, no discussion about sport would be complete without also looking at those who attend and view sports as spectators. For all sports, this is a major income stream – but all suffer from the same problems facing participation – more and more demands are being made on people’s leisure time – how can individual sports maximise their appeal to enhance attendance levels – especially as they are often competing against each other as well as other cultural activities as well as the retail market? Again, we have a lot of experience at 56 Degree Insight to help identify winning strategies for success.
How we can help
In terms of participation, we can help sports and governing bodies in many ways, including:
• Measuring levels of participation in sport whether at the overall population level or amongst specific niche groups or within sports - what is important to them, what needs to change, etc.
• Helping governing bodies develop strategies to grow participation – how to improve the experience amongst participants.
And for attendance at sports events and activities, we can help in many ways. We have a track record in helping governing bodies in football and rugby union to measure and improve upon the spectating experience. And more and more, it is appropriate to apply best practice from other sectors in brand and communications management to the sports sectors to tackle the image and appeal of individual sports. Again, we have strategies and approaches to help in this area.
We also have a great deal of past experience in sports event evaluation. We have evaluated global and local events and, working with economists, we know how to measure the economic and wider impacts of events to the local, regional and national economies.
“The Scottish Football Association value our partnership with Jim and the team. They have really helped us benchmark our performance in key areas like the Association’s reputation & player participation levels. They were also very innovative and flexible in their approach to measure the attractiveness of the grassroots game here in Scotland. We would not hesitate to work with them again”
Sports clients we have worked with……..
Our latest point of view on Sport…..
Sport - A ‘good news’ story - the Scottish Women’s game
24th March 2019: There's a lot of doom and gloom around Scottish football just now, but where we have many reasons to be optimistic is the Women's game. Here we talk about the growing interest in women's football.