In August, the Open Data Institute (ODI) announced that it had procured six projects to help people stay and get active during the pandemic, using open opportunity data. As one of the stewards of the initiative, the ODI wanted to support organisations to show the impact and value of specific tools developed as part of the OpenActive initiative. Each project received up to £15,000 to implement OpenActive standards into customer-facing products and services. The aim of this procurement process was to support smaller organisations to prioritise Open Booking and to help underrepresented communities to get more active.
Here, we share the ODI’s learnings from the process, and some of the value that this procurement has and is expected to generate.
Impact so far
- Through financial and technical support, tender awardees saved more than 12 months’ worth of development time, with an estimated efficiency saving of £95,000
- Over 500 new open opportunities aimed at supporting local communities to get active have been published
- Almost 200 school facilities where physical activity can take place to be published as open opportunity data. Opening these venues will help local community groups to run activities for young and vulnerable children outside of term-time
“The impact of this pilot is huge for us. Thanks to our open opportunities featuring as part of Sport England campaigns like Join the Movement and This Girl Can, we’re seeing a big increase in interest and signups. This helps our coaches get more customers to support them through these difficult times.”
Born Barikor, founder of Our Parks. Our Parks works with local communities to remove barriers and ensure that free, quality exercise is available to anyone.
Learnings
- Focus on both sides of the marketplace. This is not a unique learning from these pilots, but it’s worth emphasising. Throughout the OpenActive initiative, we’re always trying to balance and match the supply of opportunity data with the demand from data consumers that build the tools to help people get active.
- More regular touch points can help with understanding of aims and progress. We had kick off meetings and calls scheduled every two weeks with each project to track progress and identify blockers. Due to the short time frame of this project, if we ran the process again, we would have more regular touchpoints, and increase communication across the cohort of projects. This would help with alignment on aims of the process as a whole, as well as informing participants of progress made across the different projects.
- 2 months is not long enough to implement and see real value from the Open Booking API.
For many projects, it was difficult to implement the specification, and demonstrate significant value — that is, end-to-end user journeys of finding and booking an opportunity — within this short time frame. However, we’re confident that further value will be created, and we will stay in touch with project participants to capture future progress and impact.
“We know from speaking to hundreds of facility operators and activity providers that they all want to increase visibility of their offerings, and they believe that OpenActive can help them do that. Initial revenue generated from being Open Booking compliant is forecast to be at least 10x the cost of implementing it.”
Tom Marley, Co-Founder at Played, a booking, management and marketing platform for sports facility owners, activity providers and coaches.
This post reflects on what we have learnt from the procurement process so far. We plan to revisit each project to capture further insights and impact in the near future.
If you’re interested in how the OpenActive initiative could benefit your organisation, then visit www.openactive.io
