As an organisation we work hard to position ourselves at the heart of the sport and physical network in the humber, trying to fulfil our role of Influencing, supporting, delivering and being well organised. Whilst we have made strides in many of these areas under our revised role as directed by Sport England over the last 2 years, we felt there was a gap for us to try and work more strategically around marketing and communications.
We have always acted as a repository for information around sport and physical activity, with a large database of club and activity information on Activehumber.co.uk, as well as happily sharing partner information through our wider communication channels. We felt however that we could do more in this space, and set out an ambition at our autumn conference to help analyse, and catalyse how partners physical activity campaigns might land locally, seeking to identify common themes, common timelines, and common goals throughout the wider network we operate in.
So far we have approached this through our Head of Marketing heading out to meet with partners to try to start broader conversations around marketing and communications, to understand the landscape in which partners operate, and what their key campaign goals are for the year ahead.
The ambition is to ultimately build a much more comprehensive picture of what this looks like for the region, and where there might be areas we can either shine a spotlight on a saving in efficiency, or perhaps to help create more momentum around a topic or campaign. The last thing we wanted to do was create our own standalone physical activity campaign - we have neither the manpower nor budget to fund something that large scale, and would not want to work 'in competition' with partners.
We have morphed the title recently to become 'Project Move More' as that is ultimately what we want to achieve for the people of the Humber.
It has proved a fairly mammoth task so far, and wider members of the team are being co-opted to help get conversations started. As they already have established relationships with many of you it also makes sense as meetings and discussions are often ongoing regularly already. The picture is building, and discussions on this topic are constantly branching out into other related and relevant areas for example on how we all best utilise open data, or what other marcomms networks already exist that we can tap into. We will keep working, and keep updating you all on where we are with Project Move More as it evolves.
So if this is an area that resonates with you, or you want to talk further about your plans around campaigns, marketing and communications, please speak to your contacts at Active Humber, or if in doubt contact Richard Hall, Head of Marketing on rhall@activehumber.co.uk
