We spoke to Roger Birchenough, Director of Sport & Business at Participant UK, about their role in the OpenActive initiative.
Participant is an online booking system, specialising in events. They have a large number of customers in the sport and physical activity sector, ranging from Premier league-affiliated community clubs to National Governing Bodies like Parkour UK. Participant recently built OpenActive functionality to allow their customers to benefit from a free marketing boost and reach larger audiences for their activities.
Why did you decide to get involved with the OpenActive initiative?
We were first introduced to OpenActive through a potential customer requesting OpenActive functionality. From a commercial perspective, it makes perfect sense: it allows us to create added value for our customers, which helps us to retain existing customers and generate new business. Alongside this, we also really believe in OpenActive’s mission to remove digital barriers and make it easier for more people to get active.
OpenActive benefits the whole sector: it helps commercial organisations get more customers, it helps mission-focused organisations create more impact, and it helps the individual sitting at home, looking for ways to get active, to do just that.
You finished building OpenActive functionality earlier this year. How has it been received by your customers?
Our plan was to go live with a select group of customers to pilot the new functionality. Every organisation we approached to take part in the pilot said yes, which would have allowed over 10,000 sessions to be published as open data — and then lockdown happened!
A lot of our customers have paused their activity, or are only offering private sessions to existing customers, so are not in a position to take advantage of the OpenActive functionality yet. The good news is that we still have organisations lined up and ready to start once lockdown starts to ease for our sector — and with Participant, it’s as easy as ticking a box!
For our customers that are running virtual sessions that are open to the public, Participant’s OpenActive functionality means they can feature on products and services like Sport England’s Join the Movement live timetable. Even as lockdown eases, we expect more organisations to start offering a hybrid of virtual and in-person sessions. The move to virtual has a lot of potential for increasing accessibility to activities, and encouraging first timers to try something new.
What were some of the challenges you had to overcome?
Some customers we approached were understandably concerned about sharing personal information, but once they understood that it’s only information about the activity, and not customer information, they were fully behind it.
As the OpenActive data standards are designed to meet the needs of the whole sport and physical activity sector, it can be a challenge to keep the process as simple as possible, while meeting everyone’s needs. Ultimately, everyone has worked well together, whether the organisations are potential partners or competitors, or organisations that wouldn’t normally cross our path.
What’s next for Participant?
We’re committed to supporting our customers through this challenging time. OpenActive, and the free marketing it offers, is an important part of helping our customers get back on their feet.
If you’re an existing Participant customer and want to benefit from OpenActive, simply get in touch via phone or email, and they’ll run you through how to switch on OpenActive functionality. Essentially, it just involves ticking a box during the event set up process!
