Sports & Leisure

The number of golfers is in decline. Part of the strategy to grow the game involves increasing junior memberships. To feed into this strategy England Golf needed to be able to understand young people and establish where and how golf does and could fit into their lives.

Platypus’ mission was to provide England Golf with the tools they needed to challenge assumptions and work with stakeholders to take actions towards a shared goal.

We started by sharing our knowledge of child development and all aspects of children’s lives with the England Golf team via video, published reports and our own research in a learning workshop . Individuals from marketing, recruitment, participation and insight attended and fed in their perspectives to help form the research questionnaire and outputs.

We then embarked on a full segmentation of the junior market to identify the types of young people that were most likely to become golf players of the future.

A visual, interactive survey was designed with creative, age appropriate questions to engage kids and parents and a large sample of 1000 parents and 800 children gave ensured a high level of accuracy.

Multivariate statistical analysis was used to produce a robust segmentation of the junior market producing 7 distinct groups with information around their personalities and interests, attitudes to sport and to golf and their parent’s

2017 was an incredible first year for All Stars Cricket (the English Cricket Board’s initiative for 5-8 year olds) with over 37,000 kids taking part in 1,539 All Stars programmes across England and Wales.

But with the sign up a success was the scheme doing what it was designed to do? And how could All Stars build on this momentum for 2018 to retain current All Stars and recruit even more?

We used an approach that meant young children and parents could get across exactly how they felt about all of the details of the sessions – the good and bad.

Running the research at the All Star fixtures meant the experience was fresh in their minds and we could observe the actual sessions. With 5-8 year olds prone to short attention spans and a tendency to latch onto one aspect we turned the interview into a game and kept it flexible in content and length to feed into the different capabilities of children within this age group.

We were able to identify the aspects that needed to be maintained for the next year of ASC.

We also gave clear direction for improvement based on the communications, coaching and game content which has fed into training plans and marketing for the coming year.
Specific improvements around how to engage different groups of children e.g. girls were also taken on board

Sky Sports Living for Sport has been delivered in partnership with Youth Sport Trust since 2003. Central to the programme were over 135 world-class Athlete Mentors, who worked directly with students to inspire them to achieve their best, whatever their ability or situation. A free initiative open to all UK and Irish secondary school's offered multi-week sports projects.

It was founded on the belief that sport has the power to transform young people's lives to help them build practical skills and self-confidence.

In order to evaluate the initiative on a number of success variables we surveyed teachers, parents and kids to identify their views on any changes in themselves, their pupils or their children. Working closely with 50 schools participating in the programme, we collected attendance and attainment data based before and after participation and compared results to a control sample.

We also spent time in schools observing and interviewing young people, their teachers and coaches to understand the depth of the impact and to identify how to implement the initiative to achieve maximum impact.