“Sport England’s partnership with Facebook
will fundamentally change the way sports engage with participants,
helping them to reach out beyond existing club structures to the
young people who are the future of sport.”
Richard Lewis
Sport England’s Chair
Sport England and Facebook have announced a
new partnership that will transform the way sports bodies engage
with participants as they deliver a lasting Olympic legacy of one
million people playing more sport.
The new partnership, which will help national
governing bodies (NGBs) to reach out beyond their traditional club
structures, was launched at a mass table tennis event in London,
organised through Facebook.
It’s the first long-term collaboration between
Facebook and a government or public body in the U.K. – and will use
the social networking site’s unrivalled influence to bring people
together around sport in the run up to London 2012.
Central to this new way of working is the new
Facebook ‘Sport Hub’ which enables NGBs to engage with over 20
million people who use Facebook in the UK. The ‘Hub’ looks and
feels like a Facebook fan page but offers a range of new
applications, enabling NGBs to organise and market grassroots
sports events. Facebook users are able to challenge other people in
their area to compete against them – whether in a squash match or a
running race – and then share the results with their Facebook
friends and networks.
“Sport England’s partnership with Facebook
will fundamentally change the way sports engage with participants,”
said Richard Lewis, Sport England’s Chair. “It will help NGBs to
reach out beyond existing club structures to the young people who
are the future of sport. Four out of five youngsters have a
Facebook account, so this is a key way for us to make sport a part
of more people’s lives.”
The partnership is worth up to £20 million,
with Facebook providing an in-kind investment of £5 million a year
until March 2013.
Students and young people who use Facebook are
the first to benefit though a pilot scheme run by British
Universities & Colleges Sport (BUCS) and six sports:
- Table tennis
- Squash and racketball
- Badminton
- Judo
- Athletics
- Volleyball.
The pilot has an ambitious target to get
12,000 students participating in sport in just four months. Sport
England’s commercial team is already talking to a wide range of
NGBs in order to expand the use of the Sport Hub.
"We want to get more people more active on
campus,” said Karen Rothery, Chief Executive of BUCS. “Freshers'
week is an ideal time for new and returning students to join sports
clubs and try new activities that could last throughout their time
at university. By promoting innovative sporting activities through
the Facebook Sport Hub, we believe we can challenge many more young
people to get involved in sport socially and self-organise local
events, taking sport to the very heart of the student
experience."
“Millions of people in the UK are already
using Facebook to connect to their friends and organise events
around things that matter to them, including sport,” said Blake
Chandlee, Facebook’s Vice-President of Sales, EMEA. “By cleverly
leveraging Facebook’s tools and advertising programmes to get more
people into sport, Sport England is using our social tool as a tool
for social change.”
Sport England is working to attract £50
million of commercial value into grassroots sport by 2013. Facebook
is the first of a number of top level partnerships which we aim to
create over the next four years.
You can find out more about the table tennis
event at Kings College London by visiting its Facebook page
If you would like to know how your NGB can use
the new Sport Hub, please contact Mike Billing in
the Sport England commercial team.