Last month, Sport England published “Uniting the Movement”, its vision for the next ten years. It outlines Sport England’s mission, why it matters, what they’ll do, and how they’ll do it. We’re exploring how OpenActive could support this vision, and what sustainability for the initiative might look like.
The Sport England strategy highlights the vital role sports and physical activity plays in looking after our health and wellbeing. Each year in England, active lifestyles:
- Ensure 30 million fewer GP visits
- Prevent 900,000 cases of diabetes
- Prevent 93,000 cases of dementia (the leading cause of death in the UK)
- For every £1 invested in community sport and physical activity, nearly £4 is generated for England’s economy and society.
However, there are still inequalities in access and participation to sport and physical activity. The sector is facing a number of challenges that it needs to overcome to continue to grow the impact of sport and physical activity.
Five main challenges
Sport England identifies five challenges facing the sector:
- Recover and reinvent from the impact of the pandemic to build a vibrant, relevant and sustainable network of organisations
- Connecting communities to leverage the potential of sport and physical activity to make better places to live and bring people together
- Positive experiences for children and young people to create the foundations of a long and healthy life
- Connecting with health and wellbeing to ensure that everyone can feel the benefits of an active life
- Active environments to make it easier for people to move more
Tackling such big challenges is not the responsibility of one organisation or one initiative alone, and we need to work together.
Catalyst for change
OpenActive, which has received funding through Sport England since 2016, is an example of an initiative that brings together organisations from across the sector to collaborate, and deliver change. It’s a community-led initiative that aims to remove some of the digital barriers that stop people getting active. The OpenActive data standards are designed to make it easier to publish and use data about where, when and what activities take place.
Over the last few years, the initiative has made big steps: data about hundreds of thousands of ways to get active are published every month, this data fuels nationwide campaigns like This Girl Can, and helps local communities adapt to the sudden changes caused by the pandemic.
Sport England identifies “High quality data, insight and learning” as one of the catalysts for change needed to tackle the sector’s challenges. The OpenActive community is well placed to help deliver change by generating high quality data and its approach to bring organisations together to work on problems.
OpenActive isn’t the one single solution to any of the challenges facing the sector, but it has the potential to facilitate and strengthen a wide range of solutions. Ensuring high quality data helps improve the trust needed to deliver effective solutions, whether that’s for a consumer engaging with an innovative digital tool to help them get active, or a health worker interested in social prescribing.
Access to data is also crucial to another of the strategy’s catalysts for change: “Applying innovation and digital”. High quality data fuels digital innovation, which will help the sector meet the changing expectations of consumers, and make sport and physical activity more accessible and relevant.
What next for OpenActive?
Where there is the most potential for OpenActive to create value and deliver impact is something we’re still exploring. As part of this, we have a Sustainability Working Group, and Sport England has commissioned an external piece of research to help identify this.
If you’re interested in finding out more about the work to shape OpenActive’s sustainability options, visit our website or get in touch with your ideas.
