Sustaining participation: the role of satisfaction

Sustaining Participation: The role of satisfaction

People will only keep playing sport if they enjoy it. Understanding and measuring the quality of experience is a crucial element of our strategy and is central to our commitment to develop a world-leading community sport system. Our Sustain outcome focuses on keeping people involved with sport. At its heart is the idea that people's continued involvement is driven by the fact that they enjoy taking part and that this - in turn - is heavily affected by the quality of the sporting experience.

Evidence is emerging that people with lower levels of satisfaction are more likely to stop participating. This makes clear that ensuring high levels of satisfaction is one of the requirements in delivering sustained increases in participation.

The importance of satisfaction for local authorities

For local authorities it has long been recognised that satisfaction is an important consideration in increasing and sustaining visits to leisure centres or participating in sports development sessions. Improvement tools such as QUEST and NBS allow operators and contract managers to measure certain well-understood drivers of quality and satisfaction. These drivers are often mainly those that are extrinsic to the sporting experience of the individual such as the facility environment, staffing and accessibility. While these are important factors, our research has told us that they don’t tell the whole story: the drivers of satisfaction are more complex.

All of the materials in this section help explain what drives satisfaction in a sporting context and, in particular, in those sports which local authorities have a close interest. There are practical examples of how these insights are important in helping deliver against a range of outcomes such as increasing participation or demonstrating an increase in the quality of life for certain people which are crucial as council services start to move towards a commissioning-based model.