The challenge

Southend’s sustainable community strategy committed the local authority to increasing participation in sport and active recreation. To achieve this it needed to make sure its existing leisure facilities were being fully used.

The council needed to understand what sports and activities people living in each facility’s catchment area wanted to play and what would motivate them to take part more often. It worked with Sheffield Hallam University to help it analyse the available data including active people survey and market segmentation data.

The approach

Sheffield Hallam University was appointed to help Southend analyse the available data.

GIS data was used to identify lower super output areas (LSOAs) within a two-mile radius of each facility. Each group of around 1500 households was then profiled using Sport England’s Market Segmentation tool to identify the types of people likely to live there and their sporting attitudes and behaviours.

As well as allowing Southend to make sure it was offering the right mix of sports and activities in each facility, it also highlighted the marketing challenges it needed to tackle to successfully increase usage.

The study also looked at the range and type of facilities on offer.

Sport England’s Active Places Power tool was used to determine the number and type of facilities available, and compare this to national and regional levels. This helped to identify whether Southend had the right facilities to grow participation in the targeted groups.

The exercise raised significant questions for Southend. The most important being, what exactly was the local authority hoping to achieve and how can competing goals be balanced? A number of potential outcomes were on offer, ranging from hitting its NI 8 increased participation targets; to improving health and wellbeing, from community cohesion to income generation.

It can be challenging striking the right balance between targeting relatively affluent communities and thereby reducing the local authority subsidy and using the income generated or costs saved to subsidise more deprived sections of the community and creating activities and programmes that specifically target the populations with greatest need.

The council is working through these challenges.

The results

The exercise has helped the authority understand:

• Who does and doesn’t use its facilities?
• What is the latent demand for sport across the borough?
•  How can the largest market segments be encouraged to play more sport

The authority’s leisure and recreation strategy is now being refreshed with this information. It includes realistic actions and bottom-up targets based on better intelligence of the existing and potential customer bases.

The data is being shared with Southend’s leisure operator which has also begun using Experian’s Mosaic data to improve its targeting techniques. It will also be used as evidence when defining need with partners such as the NHS and Adult Social Care Services.

Finally the authority plans to use the data to move universal to targeted promotion and make better use of limited resources.

The lessons

• Southend has suddenly become data-rich – while this is a good thing, officers do need to learn how it can be made meaningful by understanding what’s available and how it can be used and managed.
• Decision-making should be driven by a blend of data modelling, facility data and other local intelligence.

More information

Peter Vadden, Group Manager: Culture Improvement & Development
Southend-on-Sea Borough Council
petervadden@southend.gov.uk

Jayne Wilson, Principal Consultant, Sport Industry Research Centre

j.wilson@shu.ac.uk