Sport Direct Delivery Options -...

Sport Direct

Sport Direct2005

Review of Options for Delivery

Sport England: Confidential

Sport Direct

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4

INTRODUCTION 6

INFLUENCES ON SPORT DIRECT 8

RECENT SPORT ENGLAND ACTIVITY 8DISCUSSION PAPER 8QUALITATIVE APPRAISAL OF TELEPHONE SERVICE 8CARLSON SWITCHBOARD 9Grants Management System 10ACTIVE PLACES 10Active Places data 11Promotion of Active Places 11SPORTS HUB 11PAST SPORT ENGLAND ACTIVITY 12SPORTSLINE 12SPORT ENGLAND LIBRARY SERVICE 14OTHER GOVERNMENT PROJECTS 14NHS DIRECT 14DIRECTGOV 15

FOCUS OF SPORT DIRECT 18

TARGET AUDIENCE 18NON-TARGETS 19PROMOTION – EVERYDAY SPORT CAMPAIGN 19FORTHCOMING DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH CAMPAIGN 20CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS 20HOURS OF OPERATION 21WELCOME 22INFORMATION 23DATA QUALITY 25AD HOC KNOWLEDGE BASE 26SPORTS HUB DATA 27FOLLOW-UP STRATEGY 27

DELIVERY OF SPORT DIRECT 29

DIGITAL DIVIDE 29TELEPHONE SERVICE OPTIONS 29CONTACT RECORD 31RIGHTNOW, OR SIMILAR 31SUMMARY 32WEB SITE OPTIONS 32ACTIVE PLACES 33DIRECTGOV 34NCAD 35ROLE OF SPORTS HUB 36


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SUMMARY 37RECOMMENDATIONS 38POSSIBLE TELEPHONE SERVICE COSTS 39WEB SITE PHASE 1 COSTS 40WEB SITE PHASE 2 COSTS 41SPONSORSHIP 42

APPENDICES 43

Appendix A – Interviewees 43


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Executive SummaryThe manifesto commitments and government targets that frame Sport Direct as a single source of information accessible via Web or telephone are well considered and represent a real gap that currently exists in provision. Whilst some headway has been made in providing and publicising information, notably with Active Places and Everyday Sport, gaps remain and further steps need to be taken to provide information on the terms of the citizen.

More specifically, those currently not participating in physical activity, or who wish to develop their participation, need motivation and an offer of a range of activities that are appropriate, attractive and possibly not traditionally considered as major sports. This goes beyond the facility data currently available from Active Places, to include:

New facility types; Recreational facilities such as country walks; Local event data; Club schedules.

Sport England and other bodies have previously attempted various information services, with varying degrees of success. It is clear that given present resource constraints, a closely targeted approach (aligned with the Framework for Sport) will yield the best return on investment. Further, Sport Direct must focus exclusively on information provision and leave promotion to other initiatives such as Everyday Sport and the forthcoming Department of Health campaign.

The cost of delivering Sport Direct will be minimised by taking advantage of existing business processes and systems both within Sport England and in other departments. Key amongst these is Directgov, an initiative of the Cabinet Office that provides a single point of entry for Government services for the citizen. Using Directgov as a platform for Sport Direct will enable benefits through integration with other government services and reduce the future maintenance burden for Sport England. There is a subscription cost for Directgov, but as one of the few non-subscribing departments, this is something DCMS may soon be compelled to bear anyway.

Directgov provides Web, interactive TV and mobile channels but does not offer a call centre. There is an option for Sport England to expand its switchboard to take calls for Sport Direct but this part of the offer requires further investigation – market research and results to-date from Everyday Sport show little demand for a helpline as most citizens seem to prefer self-service on the Web. An expansion of the switchboard would be an expensive option; the facility currently costs £350,000 per year and that would scale approximately in proportion to the number of calls. That number would depend on what campaigning was undertaken, which implies a management issue as regards fitting the supply of call centre capacity to the demand present at any given time. Recent Sport England campaigns have been successful in driving people to the Web rather than the telephone.

Furthermore, it is not clear how successful a telephone service could be at converting callers to participants given the limited amount of information it could provide (as compared to the Web). Specifically, a research-based case needs to be made for the telephone service in respect of the C2DE social group that is the main target of Sport


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Direct. The human aspect of the service is important but will not necessarily provide a positive return on investment on its own.

For these reasons, this report recommends the splitting of the Sport Direct project going forward into two streams, one for the Web site and a second for the telephone service. The Web site stream is further divided into two phases in order to reduce risk and deliver benefits as early as possible.

Once Sport Direct has been delivered on the Directgov platform, Sport England will be able focus on its core competencies (in this area) of managing data and serving professional users of it. Indeed, the principal operational costs in future will remain as they are now in acquiring, auditing and providing data.


Sport Direct

IntroductionSport Direct is a key part of making a bottom-up approach to sport – encouraging and empowering the participation of the citizen – work in the context of today’s busy lifestyles and individual freedom of choice. It seeks to provide to citizens the information they need on sport, in one place, on their own terms.

This report considers the scope of that information and the options for delivering it. Whilst the commitment has been made to a telephone service and a Web site, the differences between these media mean that different roles for each may be appropriate. There are also operational factors in each medium to consider.

Once a decision has been made on which options to take forward, the relevant parts of this report will form the basis of the requirements for Sport Direct as it moves into a procurement phase.

The report does not consider how Sport Direct should be promoted. This will be crucial to the success of the service but is out of scope for this particular review. The Framework for Sport describes a policy area that should cover the task.

The information used in this report came from a series of interviews conducted with the staff of Sport England and related organisations, between 2nd September and 1st November 2005. A full list of interviewees can be found in Appendix A.

The Sport Direct concept is well founded in a series of Government commitments and targets. The Labour Party Manifesto 2005 says, on page 96:

Sport in the communityTo make it easier to get access to sports in your local area we will establish Sport Direct – a single point of access for sports in the UK. One website and one phone number will help you find out what’s going on in your area.

This paragraph is part of Chapter 8 ‘Quality of life: Excellence for all’, which contains in its introduction (page 93):

Our towns and cities are being energised by sports and culture and as they are regenerated the quality of life for all is transformed. As we build on this change, our progressive challenge is to broaden participation as widely as possible, making the links between sport and health, and culture and well-being. We must combine the broadest base of participation with the ability for the most talented to progress to the very top. Our third term will embed the expectation that every child and every adult have the maximum chance to develop their creative or sporting talents.

The message is that the net must be cast as widely as possible – both physically and socially – to maximise the benefits of sport (and culture) to society. Those benefits, stated here in terms of health and achievement, are in sympathy with the DCMS Game Plan (2002), which additionally highlights education and social exclusion as areas in which increased citizen participation in sport can have an impact. It is well understood that lack of education and social disadvantage correlate strongly with poor


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health, including the current hot-topic of obesity; these targets all exist in the same hard-to-reach segment of the population.

Sport England’s Framework for Sport (2004) brings the social agenda to the fore when it says (page 6) that one strand of delivering its vision is...

“providing the solutions to increase and widen the base of participation for everyone regardless of age, gender, ethnic origin or disability”

The consensus is that the bottom-up approach to sport will accrue benefits to the individual and society as a whole.

More specifically, PSA Target 3 for DCMS seeks a 3% increase in the numbers of people from priority groups participating in sporting activities by 2008. Sport England is DCMS’s delivery partner for this target, amongst others.


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Influences on Sport DirectThere are many undertakings both inside and outside Sport England that have a bearing on the scope and delivery of Sport Direct. This section reviews those activities and projects and where appropriate comments on the lessons that can be drawn for Sport Direct.

Recent Sport England activity

Discussion PaperIn Spring 2005, Sport England commissioned a discussion paper on Sport Direct. The paper focuses on the telephone service, partly in terms of the types of information required but mainly in terms of the organisation and possible costs of a contact centre.

The foundation of a successful contact centre will be the information it can provide. That is not to say that Sport Direct should seek to provide as much information as possible; some kinds of information have a greater value than others when their impact on participation is considered.

By way of example, advice on coaching is clearly information on sport but those seeking such advice are highly likely to be engaged in sport already and so its impact on participation would be limited. (That is not to say we do not wish them to become coaches, but that we consider them to be motivated enough to find the information through channels other than the one-stop-shop of Sport Direct.)

Thus there is a kind of ‘elasticity’ whereby the value of information varies. As all information has an acquisition cost, this means that different types of information will make different contributions – positive or negative – to the benefit case for Sport Direct. The objective must be to identify the ‘profitable’ types.

At the same time, contact centres are an expensive way of delivering information, and finding the right balance of self-service options will help to minimise the cost base as much as possible.

Qualitative Appraisal of Telephone ServiceAs part of market research conducted for Everyday Sport (see below) in July 2005 by Vision 21, members of the public were questioned about aspects of the Sport Direct concept. The findings are contained in a comprehensive report1 that should be read alongside this review. Their answers present three challenges to Sport Direct:

1. Most people, even those in lower socio-economic groups, were happy to look for information on the Internet;

2. if they were to use a telephone service, they would want something free, personal (i.e., not an automated response), personalised (i.e., specific to them) and available (i.e., open beyond working hours);

1 Available from Louise Taylor at Sport England


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3. minority ethnic survey participants were concerned about the availability of language options and sensitivity to cultural norms, addressing which has the potential to greatly increase the amount of information required.

These results suggest that the most obvious implementation of Sport Direct, as parallel telephone service and Web site offering identical information, may not be the best choice in terms of meeting customer needs (in a cost effective manner). Each channel has its own relative strengths and these must be exploited to find the optimal cost benefit overall.

Carlson switchboardSince March 2004, Carlson Marketing Group has run the Sport England switchboard. Previously, an internal switchboard operated, and many direct dial numbers were given out. Poor public ratings of contacting Sport England led the Communications Director at the time to introduce a single number and a single point of contact. As well as the main 0845 (local rate) number, several other helpline numbers used for small programmes all terminate in the call centre.

Carlson was already running a call centre for the Grants Management System, and the general switchboard was added to the service mix. The call centre agents are assigned to Sport England on an ongoing basis, which is an unusual arrangement for Carlson but improves customer service because of the importance of domain-specific knowledge in handling the diverse range of calls.

For most of its life, the Carlson switchboard has operated between the hours of 8am and 6pm on weekdays (using a shift system). This has recently changed with the extension of the hours to 8pm in the evening and for a few hours at weekends to support the Everyday Sport campaign. Another third party, Please Hold UK, takes messages outside those hours.

From the Sport England side, the service is managed as an operational function, alongside the reception, property management and so on; there have been three different managers in post since the service began. Carlson operates to an SLA, which is monitored at a monthly meeting. The overall cost of the call centre at around £350,000 per year is significant, and there is an intention to put the service out to tender on a periodic basis.

One of the issues with the handover to Carlson was that of agent quality. The initial implementation was done under pressure of time and so these problems had to be addressed after the fact:

General quality of written answers provided by agents in email replies, for example spelling accuracy;

consistent ‘branding’ of responses, for example saying “we” instead of “Sport England”;

making the effort to think laterally in answering questions rather than giving the easiest ‘boilerplate’ answer, for example “We don’t provide information on individual sports.”


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The experience with the call centre shows that outsourcing is not always an easy or cheap option. Neither should the operation of the service be taken for granted when it is in fact the public face of the organisation as far as many customers are concerned.

Grants Management SystemThe GMS has been the subject of a review by Capita, but some characteristics of the business area are pertinent to Sport Direct and thus worthy of mention here.

One of the issues for Sport England was that the number of grant applications emerging from the GMS process was too high. Regional offices were getting more applications than they could fund, because the process was not filtering out non-starters. One reason for this was that form that needed to be completed was of a very open nature; with a decision-making element built in to it, time could have been saved for all parties – the applicant, the call centre and Sport England. The lesson here is that it is better to feedback little and often, and such a ‘conversational’ style might work well when information gathering has to take place for Sport Direct.

An officer has recently been appointed to provide leadership in the GMS area. This post should bring focus to the end-to-end process for grants and lead to an improved customer experience in another important public-facing part of the business. A similar single point of responsibility should be considered for Sport Direct, either permanent or during the rollout of the service.

Active PlacesActive Places is Sport England’s search engine for sporting facilities (http://www.activeplaces.com). It was launched in July 2004 after five months’ development and is funded by the Big Lottery Fund. At its heart are a location-based search engine and an England-wide database of sports facilities, mainly schools, leisure centres and health clubs but including grass pitches. This allows users to search for sports facilities near a given location, usually by specifying a postcode. It is not possible to search by particular sports or to find club information.

The main users of Active Places are local authorities and other bodies involved in planning for sports facility development including governing bodies and central government. They use a ‘Power’ version of the tool to establish where gaps in provision exist, as part of planning to meet a target for most citizens to be within 20 minutes of a multi-sport facility by 2008, another manifesto commitment (page 95). Sport England has just started a free training programme run by external consultants to help Power users get the most from the system.

The non-power version is available for public use. This has fewer options but does not require registration. A revamp is being considered for the public site to bring the search onto the front page and possibly add features such as notifications of new local facilities. It is also planned to incorporate data for the other home nations and possibly more types of facility, with the possibility of ultimately creating a sports portal. Budget exists for the revamp but the project is currently on hold.

At the time of writing, Active Places gets around 13,000 hits per month. It has previously reached 15,000 on the back of promotional activity (see below). Little


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feedback has been sought from users, but the project is perceived within Sport England as a success. A feedback form may be put online, and Power users will be asked to complete a detailed questionnaire annually asking not only about their experience of the site but what they are using the data for.

Active Places dataActive Places is composed of several databases aggregated together. The core database is one of sports facilities (mainly buildings, but also synthetic pitches) that is maintained by The Leisure Database Company. This has over time incorporated some smaller databases, most recently 3,500 sites taken on from consultancy PMP, but all are now in one format. Data on grass pitches comes from Landmark, another supplier that also provides the hosting for Active Places.

Further, Sport England itself acts as a supplier to some other organisations, such as the Football Foundation, in that it has taken on their data (the Register of Football Facilities, ReFF) and now keeps it up to date for them, passing back updates on a subscription basis. It will be doing the same for the UK Running Track directory.

Data quality is an important consideration for Sport England, and a lot of effort is put into validating the accuracy and currency of the details of facilities. This is particularly important because of the professional purposes for which the data is used in the Power version of the site. One issue until recently has been that updates from TLDC had been very occasional, but a new XML2-based interface recently implemented has reduced this to a daily cycle.

A relationship with the Office of National Statistics provides the mapping element of the service. The terms of this agreement prevent any commercial exploitation of the Active Places site; however, there is awareness within Sport England of the value of the Active Places dataset in itself, and some discussions have taken place with Landmark about the possibility of packaging the data in ways useful to various industries. The XML-based format makes this easier from a technical perspective.

Promotion of Active PlacesThe public version of Active Places has not been widely promoted. The highest-profile activity has been two tours of shopping centres by athletes, one in Autumn 2004 and one in July 2005. These included the installation of kiosks for the day, so that passers-by could try Active Places for themselves.

Many sites link to Active Places, such as those of local authorities, the BBC, health agencies and governing bodies. Most referrals come from the search engines of Google and Yahoo!, to which Active Places was submitted. The site is not optimised for search engine placement, however, and it is not clear with what search terms users might succeed in finding the site if they did not know its name at the outset.

Sports HubSports Hub is a private company in partnership with Sport England created to take forward a concept known as ‘Sports Search’; this was originally piloted by Sport England but not developed. Sports Search is aimed at matching people with sports 2 A self-describing data format that can be read by a wide range of systems and applications


Sport Direct

that are appropriate for them, given their physical abilities and personal preferences; a good selection of over 100 sports is covered (obviously not all possible sports). Matches are linked to local clubs, where the individuals can develop their ability within the framework of coaching and support available.

Sports Search is currently being rolled out in secondary schools, linked to the tests that pupils have to undertake as part of the National Curriculum. From September 2006 it will roll out in junior schools (there are different considerations for younger participants, in that early specialisation is not thought to be a good thing) and there is also an adult version under development.

Sports Hub also maintains a club database, in order to be able to provide that information directly to Sports Search participants. There is a full national directory of all clubs, accessible to all, and a subset of clubs participating in Sports Search. Some of the clubs are accredited in various ways, either using their governing bodies’ schemes (for example, football’s Standard Charter) or with Sport England’s Clubmark; others are working towards accreditation

The club database has been built in such as way as to be accessible through third party Web sites, such as those of local authorities. Indeed, some of the source data came from local authorities and is now maintained by Sports Hub for a fee, and presented back through the authority Web sites.

The data comprising the club database is mainly self-maintained though Web submissions and some paper forms. Responses are sense-checked by Sports Hub, and reminders are sent out at appropriate times (such as before the start of a season) to try to ensure data is current. A concern in this area is the willingness of clubs to provide data to non-governmental bodies, something that has proven a problem in the past.

Sports Hub also has supporting data for sports, such as what clothing is required. The NSPCC are part of the partnership and provide advice on engaging safely with clubs and sports. In these ways the company has thought beyond its basic search and club data in order to help educate participants, thereby minimising bad experiences. Sport Direct can learn from and build on these ideas.

Past Sport England activity

SportslineFor some years during the 1990s, a service called Sportsline was run by The Leisure Database Company (“TLDC”), who now supply the main body of data for the Active Places service (see below). Sportsline was funded by London Borough Grants Committee3, Sport England’s London region and the Countryside Commission. Its purpose was to get people involved in sport by reducing the barriers to entry – in this case, by providing information.

It was principally a telephone service, albeit one backed by systems support in the shape of a database developed by TLDC. Some Viewdata terminals were placed in local libraries. At its peak it served 10,000 Londoners per year from a call centre of 3 Part of the Association of London Government (http://www.alg.gov.uk)


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just a few seats. Having relatively few staff meant that each operator answered thousands of enquiries and developed a “taxi driver’s” knowledge of sporting facilities in the capital. Customers were sometimes referred from venues and from Sport England itself.

Information was gathered from sites and from governing bodies, in respect of the facilities and events taking place. Some of the data was for non-approved facilities. This was recorded at a very granular level to better answer the types of query made by callers; for example, Sportsline recognised twelve different styles of Karate. It also included details of whether a club was suitable for beginners, whether there was a crèche or nursery and so on.

The data was stored in a free-form text format. This meant it was quick to update but hard to query in a lateral way (for example, to see which facilities had crèches). The main search path was geographical, based on where the caller wanted to find a facility.

Sportsline captured information about each caller. This was mainly used for call-backs, profiling and reporting (although sometimes callers wanted information posting to them). Around one third of callers were beginners. There was no attempt to de-duplicate information and develop a contact history for individuals, but anecdotally the operators knew that they had regular users.

Call-backs were a vital part of the operation of Sportsline, and allowed TLDC to validate its approach and the information it was giving out. It also meant that sometimes callers could be put in touch with each other for joint activities in a sort of “buddy” system; this idea attracted some media interest.

TLDC was able to demonstrate an increase in participation brought about by the information it provided; a conversion rate of more than 50% was confirmed by independent consultants. The call centre also received feedback from clubs and venues, which showed its referrals were mentioned by people using the facilities.

Sportsline was discontinued when funding ran out. Its success during its lifetime is evidence that given the right service mix there is definite demand for easy-to-access information on sport. However, some environmental factors have changed in the intervening time that must be taken into account for Sport Direct:

The general expectation that at least the same information will be available online in a self-service form;

the current common model of call centre outsourcing is to use non-specific agents (i.e., agents who may be shared with other clients or who may rotate through the account), and this mitigates against individuals developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject matter.

Sport England library serviceFor some years in the 1980s and 1990s, Sport England ran a public helpline known internally as the ‘library service’. It had a very wide brief and attempted to answer a whole range of questions from “How do I get mud out of clothes?” to nutrition to


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professional enquiries from architects and authors. Some professional customers bought material from Sport England’s publications arm. An email facility was introduced alongside the telephone line, and fact sheets addressing common questions were published on the Sport England Web site. There were no follow-ups of enquiries to measure success, but the staff came to know repeat callers.

The service was backed by an in-house library that was actively maintained using Bookseller4 and subscriptions to relevant journals; any hardcopy resources requested by Sport England staff were also incorporated into the library. The library received visitors by appointment to conduct research of their own.

To some extent the service was a victim of its own success, as well as a huge increase in sports education programmes during the early 1990s, and struggled to cope. At its peak, the library service had six staff and dealt with one thousand calls and one hundred emails per week. Its availability had to be progressively restricted in order for the staff to cope with the volume of enquiries; staffing was generally on a part-time basis anyway, with the individuals having other responsibilities. As the direction of Sport England was reviewed, the library service came to be seen as a poor fit.

In 2004 the remaining service was incorporated into the Carlson switchboard service (see below). The existing fact sheets were handed over and the call centre agents began to develop their own knowledge and documentation of the subject matter; it has generally taken around 8-12 months for someone to become competent, and there has been a turnover of 55% of agents since the beginning. There is still significant interaction with Sport England staff, both reactively to answer more unusual questions and proactively to inform agents about happenings in Sport England. There has been some discussion of allowing them access to the Sport England intranet, and although this has not been possible there is a shared extranet facility.

The library now resides at the University of Central Lancashire, where it is in the process of being incorporated into that institution’s resources. Its electronic catalogue is available to Sport England, but access is clearly not as easy as before.

The library service was both an ambitious undertaking and one for which the benefit case was not easily measured. The tension between these factors and the manual nature of the service – due largely to the technology available at the time – was ultimately not sustainable.

Other government projects

NHS DirectThe first and most obvious influence on Sport Direct is NHS Direct. Launched in 1998, with an accompanying Web site launched in 1999, it has become a very successful, volume service with high approval ratings from patients. Some of its objectives are very similar to those of Sport Direct:

4 A weekly trade magazine listing newly published books (http://www.thebookseller.com)


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“supporting patients to becoming more empowered, better informed and more able to exercise choices over their own health and health care”5

However, there are also significant differences that prevent the success of NHS Direct from providing a template business case for Sport Direct:

NHS Direct takes people out of the physical NHS, providing a cost saving that has no parallel for Sport Direct;

the information is provided by a pool of medical professionals, a comparable resource to which does not exist in the sports world;

the information provided is often urgently needed, or at least perceived as being so by the customer;

the funding level of the service is currently over £100m per annum, which is far beyond the resources of Sport England.

DirectgovDirectgov is an initiative of the Cabinet Office that is intended to provide a single point of entry for Government services for the citizen. It grew out of the e-Government Unit, whose overriding objective is the modernisation of government, and is primarily a Web portal. Directgov operates in partnership with individual departments; it has created the philosophy and set direction, and helps departments to build skills to manage their involvement. The departments themselves then take responsibility for delivery, in the context of their own e-business strategies.

Directgov addresses the single point of entry concept by organising information into ‘franchises’, which are natural groupings that are meaningful to citizens (for example, ‘Education and learning’ and ‘Money, tax and benefits’). Crucially, this does not correlate directly with the responsibilities of departments, of which citizens should not have to have knowledge. Directgov reached critical mass (in its own terms) in May 2005 when sixteen franchises were online; there are three more in development.

A particular department leads each franchise, however. That department is responsible for putting a team together to develop the area, co-ordinating contributions from other departments and leading on content production. This latter responsibility can be quite significant, as the veracity of information is vital because it is backed by the authority of government. In the most extreme cases, legal specialists sometimes have to get involved. Having said that, the tone of Directgov is ultimately soft, friendly and jargon-free in order to make it more appealing and accessible, which in turn promotes ongoing use by the citizen.

The relevant franchise for Sport Direct is ‘Leisure and recreation’. At the moment it is not being led by any department. Directgov would like DCMS to lead, but DCMS has yet to opt-in to Directgov; it may be the case in future that participation for all departments is made mandatory through top-slicing. The Transformational Government strategy launched on 2nd November 2005 (and introduced by Tony Blair) has committed to the following (paragraph 33):

5 ‘Developing NHS Direct’ (Department of Health)


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“… Government’s call centres will be rationalised, building on the work already done by the National Audit Office and many Local Authorities.”

“…For each government organisation the number of different web sites it uses will be reduced and consistency introduced in line with its overall communications strategy. For customer information, self-service transactions and campaign support, services will converge on Directgov and Business Link as the primary on-line entry points; service-specific or standalone solutions will be phased out.”

Other departments not yet participating in Directgov are the MoD, DfID and the Foreign Office.

For an individual department, the major benefits of participating in Directgov are fourfold:

1. More citizens are likely to find its information, as they will always go to the same place for Government information and don’t need to find or remember individual Web sites;

2. Directgov will ‘cross-sell’ the information to visitors who arrived at Directgov looking for something else (for example, someone looking for health information might also be offered information on exercise);

3. Directgov has a multi-channel strategy encompassing mobile, kiosk6 and DiTV7 , the latter of which in particular would be prohibitively expensive for an individual department to implement;

4. a cost saving may be possible by using Directgov for the presentation of departmental information and concentrating internal resources on managing that information (of course, depending on the cost structure at the outset).

Directgov also feels it has reached critical mass in terms of the number of visitors it is receiving – around 2m per month. The demographics of those visitors have previously been biased towards higher socio-economic groups, possibly because of a lot of civil service users, but viral usage has widened its base. Directgov’s latest audience research shows that about half of users (up to 57%) were in the C2DE category and that female users (53%) are slightly over-represented in terms of the UK’s usual online population. A widespread promotional campaign planned for early 2006 should make its catchment truly representative. Presently, marketing is mainly via search engines and links from other Government Web sites.

Most of the content on Directgov is currently textual or consists of links to other Web sites, some governmental and some not. A major programme of ‘tools and transactions’ is underway for delivery in 2006, which will provide a range of capabilities for working with more structured data within Directgov. An example of a tool could be a geographical search engine to find local schools (and their league table results), and a transaction could be paying for a driving licence. There is also the ability to set up and run decision trees, current examples allowing citizens to check whether or not they qualify for housing or council tax benefits.

6 Kiosks are provided by third-party networks, such as iPlus (http://www.cityspace.com) and mylocal (http://www.mylocal.org.uk), with whom Sport England has previously held discussions7 Digital interactive television, the ‘red button’


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Another area of future expansion for Directgov will be into local government services, which is to say that local authorities will contribute to the development of franchises as well as central government departments. In future, Directgov will work with the devolved administrations of the home nations to integrate their information and services. Directgov also has the ability to localise information, in other words to filter or prioritise information based on the location of the enquirer.

One thing that Directgov does not have at the time of writing is a registration facility. This means that visitors cannot personalise their use of the site. However, registration is planned and will be important for the success of the transactions project, as users need to be able to store personal information to make regular transactions easier.


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Focus of Sport DirectThe most pressing imperative for Sport Direct is to contribute to delivering the DCMS PSA target to increase participation in priority groups by 3% by 2008. This contribution will be most easily made and measured if Sport Direct does not try to widen its scope too far beyond this.

However, there are many options at the detail level and this section explores those choices. This is done for the purpose of exposing the full range of considerations and consequences, and does not attempt to say exactly what should be delivered or when; that is reserved for the next section.

Target audienceA technical note on the measurement of DCMS’s PSA targets defines priority groups as follows:

Those people with a physical or mental disability . i.e. defined by themselves as having any long-standing illness, disability or infirmity that limits their activities in any way.Those people from black or minority ethnic groups. i.e. defined by themselves as Asian or British Asian (Indian, Pakistani & Bangladeshi, Other Asian Background); Black or British Black (Black Caribbean, Black African, Other Black Background); Mixed Ethnicity; Chinese and Other Ethnic Groups

Those people in socio-economic groups C2, D and E. Defined by themselves through NS-SEC and then mapped across to C2DE.

In the case of sport, in line with Governments commitments to Game Plan, (the Government’s strategy for sport to 2020, pub Dec 2002), women are also defined as a priority group.

Combined, these groups represent around 70% of the population. However, this is a diverse majority and some are amongst the hardest to reach in society; Sport Direct must address them on their own terms. If purchase can be gained amongst those groups, the rest of the population can reasonably be assumed to have been influenced also.

Sport Direct must recognise that even the word ‘sport’ is a turn-off for much of its audience. Many in the target audience may have had their last experience of ‘sport’ at school, and it may have been a bad one. Sport Direct must be very careful about how it presents itself – its branding – and the activities it advocates. In the Vision 21 research discussed above, the name ‘Sport Direct’ was generally disliked, not only for its use of ‘sport’ but also because ‘direct’ has become something of a cliché.

With such reactions possible, everything must be right when an appeal is made to the citizen, as there may be only one chance at success. The wrong first impression could actually entrench (potential) customers in their lack of interest. This could be a challenging area for Sport England, as its staff is so deeply involved in a sporting


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culture that it may be difficult to enter the mind of the audience. Every aspect of the experience needs to be considered:

Branding and promotion of Sport Direct; setting of customer expectations; hours of operation; welcome given; information offered; follow-up strategy.

These aspects are discussed in detail in the sections that follow.

Non-targetsWhat should be clear is that Sport Direct should not target people in the business of sport – architects, local authority planners, authors or anyone with a professional interest. This is an entirely different group that has a commercial motivation and to include them would weaken the benefit case for Sport Direct and make it more complex to implement.

Similarly, anyone seeking information about forming a club, volunteering, careers or getting into coaching is likely already participating regularly in sport and personally knowledgeable and motivated enough to seek out the information they require by other means. Future phases of Sport Direct could seek to provide information for this group, but in the first instance the project risk will be lower by (at most) providing referrals to other information sources and focusing instead on the core audience.

Promotion – Everyday Sport campaignThe Everyday Sport (“EDS”) campaign has been running since mid-September 2005. Before this, two trials were conducted in the Northeast region. It is intended to be a four-year effort to increase the amount of habitual exercise undertaken by citizens. The EDS helpline (operated as part of the Carlson call centre) offers information from Active Places as well as topics specifically prepared for the campaign. The dedicated EDS Web site has information on major events (such as the Great North Run) provided by local authorities; local events is one of the types of information requested by the focus groups in the Vision 21 market research.

This campaign is just the sort of front required to make Sport Direct a success. Indeed, EDS can be considered something of a guide in the way that the public responds to it. Statistics from the call centre show a relatively small number of calls, although within that there has been significant interest in local events and ideas for new sports to try. The EDS Web site has been very popular and the number of ‘toolkits’ downloaded (about 17,000 in the first few months) shows that visitors have a high probability of taking action and are not just passing traffic. It may be that ultimately the cost of campaigning dwarfs the implementational and operational costs of Sport Direct.

The focus of EDS is definitely one of campaigning, whereas Sport Direct is an information source. EDS needs a resource such as Sport Direct to live up to its potential. At the moment, EDS encourages people to increase their activity level by walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift or getting off the bus a stop early.


Sport Direct

However, anyone who likes this and wishes to go further will experience something of an information gap. The Active Places data is quite formal by comparison with the approach of EDS – it is about sporting facilities. Amongst other things, Sport Direct needs to plug this gap with information on healthy activities for their own sake that is not so formalised as to put off non-sporting types. An example of this might be going for a walk in the park. Plugging this gap will be crucial to meeting the expectations of the target audience.

Forthcoming Department of Health campaignThe Department of Health is planning to launch a major public awareness campaign in Spring 2006, targeting obesity. This can be compared to the successful anti-smoking campaigns of recent years. Part of the campaign will emphasise healthy eating, and part the value of exercise in keeping weight under control. This overarching initiative would seem to complement EDS and be a potentially very useful feeder campaign for Sport Direct. Referrals could happen directly from promotional materials, or via GPs or NHS Direct, where the expert deems that exercise is an appropriate remedy for a given complaint.

Customer expectationsThe ability to meet a customer’s expectations is of course dependent on what expectation is created by the promotional campaign in the first instance! However, what is certain is that customers must be served on their own terms.

On one level, this means simple things like being treated with respect even though they are possibly ignorant of the subject matter, and the service being available when they want to use it (see below) in a way they are comfortable with.

The importance of the telephone service cannot be overstated in this regard. The telephone is more ubiquitous than ever, and making it the primary way of accessing Sport Direct for the first time will lower the barrier as much as possible for everyone. (In the most difficult of cases, it will be a matter of eliminating as many excuses as possible and so if the service is accessible whilst remaining in front of the television, all the better.)

Consideration should be given to using a memorable telephone number for the service. For example, NHS Direct uses 0845 4647. This is unique in its simplicity (most numbers are obviously longer), and the EDS number of 0800 587 6000 is certainly reasonable.

These numbers raise the question of call cost. Respondents to Vision 21 expressed some concern over the potential cost of using the Sport Direct telephone service. Whilst the current number is a Freefone 0800, this will not necessarily be free for callers from all mobile networks. When the service is implemented, it will be important to ensure with the individual mobile network operators that this important public service is indeed free. Sport Direct should also be prepared to call customers back if they have any kind of cost concerns (even if those concerns are not justified).


Sport Direct

On another level, serving customers on their own terms means providing a reasonable range of information that is suitable for the target audience. There should be guidance as to what is available, choice and options around levels of physical capability.

As discussed above, an information gap currently exists between the advocacy of EDS and the structure of Active Places. This needs to be filled, to provide a spectrum of options. Where the information could come from to fill this gap is discussed below, but simply put, many people just need to start doing some form of specific informal exercise or get out of doors for a leisure activity. This may not just be an information gap, but also a confidence gap. Customers may need to be reassured that they can start in a small way and work up, that no special equipment or large cost needs to be involved, and that there is no risk.

Something that the telephone service can bring to Sport Direct that the Web site cannot is the human touch. The emphasis of the telephone service should be encouragement and motivation, reassurance and building confidence. This could help to overcome any number of inhibiting factors such as embarrassment, uncertainty about what to ask for, doubt about outcomes and so on. Building confidence will be vital for people beginning participation to get off to a successful start.

Sport Direct must also consider new developments in telephony. An agent being able to send a motivational video clip or multimedia message, or an educational voicemail to a customer’s mobile phone would add depth to the service and would specifically appeal to the younger members of the target audience (a large part of the BME segment overlaps with the youth segment). Some of these ideas use 3G technology8, others are possible on a widespread basis now. Whilst these are cost options for Sport Direct, they would be more cost effective than the equivalent time spent by the agent remaining on the line with the customer; indeed, the mobile services could be developed to make use of existing Web content in order to minimise ongoing expense.

For those developing their participation, Sport Direct needs to recognise that some people are interested in sports that do not have a governing body, or are just not significant enough to be amongst its Top 20. Referring people to outside bodies too early risks losing their interest; Sport Direct needs to support them along their way until they are confident and knowledgeable to continue alone.

Hours of operationFor EDS, the call centre operates from 8am to 8pm on weekdays, 11am to 3pm on Saturday and 11am to 2pm on Sundays. These hours will probably have to be extended further for Sport Direct, possibly later in the evening and certainly over the weekend.

The case for evening opening is that this is when many people will have time to make calls, and of course when many people will be most exposed to marketing messages (possibly on television, or in a newspaper – the largest single source of leads for EDS when it is part of the marketing mix9). They must have the opportunity to respond immediately, as there will certainly be a drop-off of interest if they are not able to.

8 The third generation of mobile phone networks, capable of carrying larger amounts of data including video9 According to Carlson statistics for week commencing 17th October 2005


Sport Direct

The case for weekend opening is that this is when many people will be most likely to undertake new physical activities, especially during the winter months. The service needs to be available when people require ideas or information. In this situation, it needs to be sensitive to seasonality and weather conditions.

Indeed, there may be a case for being more sensitive to family activities during school holidays. There is some evidence to show that people are more likely to persist with activities when they are doing them jointly with others, and of course inducting children into a culture of exercise will contribute to the health of the nation for years to come. Conversely, people are themselves less likely to exercise if they cannot find something to occupy their children at the same time.

WelcomeThe welcome given to customers of Sport Direct will set the tone for the whole interaction. The crucial element is customer recognition.

For the telephone service, Vision 21 research showed an aversion to negotiating an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system. An IVR is probably not appropriate for Sport Direct in any case as the expectation is that questions will be posed in a relatively freeform manner unsuitable for coding into a menu structure.

Therefore the aim should be for an agent to answer each call directly. (SLAs will need to be agreed with the call centre operator on how long calls are allowed to ring for.) Calling Line Identification (“CLI”) technology coupled to a database will allow agents to recognise previous callers and welcome them by name (or at least say “Is that John?” to allow for multiple callers from a single household).

The same database should allow for the compilation of a contact record so that agents know who spoke to the caller previously and what was discussed. This will facilitate an interaction such as “Did you try the stretching that my colleague Bob suggested?”. It may even be possible to use the database to route a returning caller to the same agent they spoke with previously, if available (this functionality will depend on the systems in use by the call centre). Of course, the agents should always give their own names.

Thus a returning call can pick up where the previous one left off, and over time the customer will feel that an ongoing conversation and rapport has developed with Sport Direct, albeit across separate calls with possibly different agents.

Less sophistication is possible on the Web site, but it is still possible to recognise returning visitors and also what they showed an interest in previously. A simple “Welcome back!” on the first page is a start.

Because a conversation as such is not possible, the contact record needs to be used differently on the Web. It could be as simple as a link saying “Take me back to where I left off”, so that if the customer had last been looking at information on badminton, they would be returned to the same page. An intermediate version might be to provide a list of areas they had looked at recently, or had spent the most time on – a kind of Top 10 interests.


Sport Direct

In its fully developed form, this functionality would analyse the areas looked at and attempt to suggest further areas of interest. For example, if the visitor had looked at badminton and squash, the system might discern an interest in racket sports and direct the visitor to tennis. Whilst clearly more complex, this functionality adds significant value as it expands the horizon of the visitor rather than just reminding them of where they have been before. The level of functionality available will depend in part on the implementation route chosen for the Web site, discussed below.

Some form of registration system on the Web site would also allow more pro-active suggestions to be made, on the basis of location, age, sex, fitness level or other parameters gathered. These suggestions could appear on the Web site itself, or be ‘pushed’ to users via email, text message or RSS10 feed. Registration would also raise the possibility of connecting the contact record on the Web site with the contact record in the call centre, allowing the ongoing interaction between the customer and Sport Direct to become even more continuous.

The other aspect of ‘welcome’ that is important for the Web site is its appearance and structure. As with the name and brand of Sport Direct in general, there should not be too much emphasis on sport per se. By contrast, Active Places features multiple pictures of people engaged in sport. Sport Direct should portray a range of activity so as not to put off people not looking for information on formal sports.

The structure of the Web site is also important. The portal concept is a good one, in that it offers a range of information to not only make it easy for visitors to find what they want but also to convey a feeling of choice and possibility. In particular, search facilities should be available on the front page; visitors will be familiar with Google and the like, where they can find what they are looking for with a minimal number of clicks.

Whilst a portal structure is good for enthusiastic or returning visitors, the Web site also needs to recognise that, if the accompanying marketing is working, a significant number of visitors will be first-timers. There should be a very clear “New users start here” message to introduce people to what is available and how to access it (effectively a help system), again working with their expectations to deliver a successful experience.

InformationThe wording of the manifesto commitment emphasises, deliberately or otherwise, local events – “what’s going on in your area.” Indeed, this type of information has proved relatively popular with callers to the EDS helpline, and was shown to be of interest to the Vision 21 focus groups. The Sport England’s London region has plans to make the information available on EDS more comprehensive, possibly in conjunction with Sports Hub.

Local event data is not easy to come by, however. By its very nature it is decentralised and changes frequently. It is not realistic for Sport Direct itself to be able to continually gather low-level event information on a national basis without a 10 An XML-based format to enable Web page ‘headlines’ to be read and processed by machines


Sport Direct

significant manual effort. A more effective solution would be to aggregate data from local authorities, governing bodies and clubs.

Local authorities and governing bodies already provide data on large-scale events, such as the Great North Run and the LTA’s cross-club Play Tennis campaign. This is currently compiled annually by Sport England to produce an A5 format card. Ideally the data could be produced electronically at source using a syndication format such as RSS, which could be automatically used on the Sport Direct Web site. This approach would yield an operational cost saving and could be extended to capture more and more small events, thereby increasing local interest. Local authorities have a vested interest in providing such data (as they strive to meet the 2008 target for every citizen to be within 20 minutes of a multi-sport facility), but it may be that the Audit Commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment can also be brought to bear11.

Clubs could provide basic recurring data, such as ‘beginners sessions every Tuesday at 8pm’, possibly via a submission Web page set up for this purpose. Alternatively, they could provide a link to any existing Web-based schedules they have. One of the issues with club data of any kind is that it can’t currently be related to the facility data available from Active Places as that system doesn’t know which clubs meet at which facilities. This will be addressed with Sports Hub’s next annual survey, when it will ask clubs where they play and where they train, allowing the databases to be linked together and making club events data useful. Sports Hub has further benefits to offer Sport Direct that are discussed in detail elsewhere.

It is clear that Sport Direct should offer the same facility content as Active Places, ideally supplemented with more types of facilities corresponding to popular sports (for example, BMX and skateboarding parks). Sport England is incorporating new datasets into Active Places on a periodic basis so its coverage should improve naturally over time. This content should ideally be searchable not just by location but also by facility type, so that a question such as “How close to home can I play football” can be answered.

What is more challenging is for Sport Direct to combine this data with that for less structured facilities such as country and city parks, common land, river banks and so on, to provide the spectrum of options discussed above. There is a wealth of data of this sort that exists within the delivery agencies of DEFRA. Much of the data is already available on the Web sites of those agencies, but suffers three problems in its presentation there:

Being divided amongst several sites, substitution or cross-selling is not possible – someone looking for a canal might equally enjoy a river, or would be even more interested if it ran alongside a park;

potential customers may not necessarily even think to look for information on the Web site of a government agency;

there is no impetus to standardise the way in which the data is stored, or the basis on which it is checked and maintained.

To be fair, these issues are recognised by DEFRA and a project know as NCAD (National Countryside Access Database) has been discussed in order to pull the data

11 See http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/cpa/


Sport Direct

sources together in a citizen-friendly way (see below). However, the project has existed for several years without securing funding.

DEFRA and Sport England have also had discussions about incorporating some of the data into Active Places. Sport England and DEFRA have a joint budget allocated for exploring at a technical level the ways in which the data could be combined or at least searched as one. These and other options for delivering the searchable facility component of Sport Direct are discussed below.

As well as searchable data – events and facilities – Sport Direct also needs to provide written content introducing customers to individual sports and activities. This would probably need to include (but not necessarily be limited to) something about rules and conduct, health benefits, potential risks, equipment and clothing required (if any). This will go against the grain for Sport England – it normally passes enquiries about individual sports on to governing bodies – but to expect content such as this from Sport Direct is certainly reasonable from the customer’s point of view.

An option may be to utilise other existing sources of similar information, such as Sports Hub or BBC Sport’s ‘Health & Fitness’ or ‘Sport Academy’ Web sites. Going a step further, Sport Direct could link to enthusiast sites for particular sports, particularly those of niche interest, where the very latest information is likely to be available. Some enthusiast sites – particularly blogs12 – are now very professional and treated as small enterprises by their writers.

Sport Direct should not seek to provide information outside the scope of that required for direct participation. It has been said already that professional, career and coaching information is not of significant benefit in the first phase of the project.

Likewise, some enquiries may stray into related but specialised domains such as health and nutrition. For Sport Direct to attempt to answer such queries would duplicate the effort of others, as well as being potentially dangerous (due to a lack of specific expertise). The service should make referrals in these cases to NHS Direct.

Data qualityIt is clear from the discussion above that to provide a rounded Sport Direct service suitable for the target audience, Sport England will have to combine its own data with some from outside. This raises issues of ownership and quality.

Sport England currently takes data quality – correctness and currency – very seriously. Data submitted by third parties (for example, managers at facilities) is checked on a regular basis. This is an expensive process, with the current ten datasets costing about £500,000 per annum to maintain. Other organisations, governmental or otherwise, do not necessarily have the resources to do such checking with the result that their data may be less accurate.

The issue facing Sport England is that if it incorporates such data into its products (Active Places for instance), it is effectively speaking for the data. Any inconsistencies that are then revealed reflect badly on the organisation.

12 A ‘blog’ – Web log – is effectively a technology-enhanced diary published on the Web


Sport Direct

In some cases, this can be dealt with field-by-field. For example, Sport England will not utilise the ‘nursery/crèche’ field captured by TLDC for Active Places, because it is not qualified enough – the field simply says whether a facility has a crèche or nursery, and not whether it is supervised or for what age groups it is appropriate.

In the worst case, an entire dataset may be unsuitable for incorporation. In this case, Sport Direct could make an explicit referral (explicit in that the customer understands they are being given data by a different organisation, whether that be on the telephone or via link on the Web site). However, this degrades customer service and performance in a different way, in that each indirection is an extra step for the customer and an opportunity to drop out.

When datasets are combined, another aspect of quality that needs to be considered is that of duplication. It is possible that because of the overlapping remits of different projects and databases, the same information may exist in more than one place. Whilst this sort of thing is typically easy to recognise for a human it is often very difficult for a machine, and the volumes of data involved may prevent manual checking.

Quality also applies to textual content on the Web site. An editorial approval process such as that used by Directgov is a way of regulating the standard and tone of voice of content that is produced internally, but there also needs to be constant review of external resources that are linked to. That means making sure that links continue to work (as resources potentially move around over time), and that the linked-to resource remains fit for purpose or is otherwise replaced.

The Sport Direct Web site should allow visitors to give feedback on data quality, to point out issues of any kind. Also, the entities to which data relates – facilities, clubs or whatever – should be encouraged to check the public view of their own information by visiting the site directly.

Ad hoc knowledge baseThere is also the potential for information to be generated by the Sport Direct service itself. Some customer questions will not be covered by the event or facility data or editorial content. In these cases, the call centre agents should undertake to get back to customers with the information, and then attempt to source it themselves from governing bodies, Sport England or other resources (from more specialised colleagues to the Internet in general).

This is actually what happens in the Carlson switchboard when a query cannot be answered. Closely related is topical information that is prepared in advance in anticipation of queries. However, the present switchboard processes does not record the questions and answers in a very accessible way. Apparently, the information is stored in an Excel spreadsheet that is available to all agents.

A better solution would be for these questions and answers to accrue in a searchable knowledge base. Agents could update this in real time as they answered unusual questions – having first of course searched to ensure an answer did not already exist! – and furthermore the knowledge base could be published on the Sport Direct Web site so that the same queries could be made there.


Sport Direct

Time spent by agents on finding answers is relatively expensive and a system such as this would leverage that expense to provide the best return. Publishing the knowledge base on the Web would reduce the number of calls to the telephone service, yielding a potential cost saving.

One final consideration in this area is that any knowledge base and the system around it should be owned by Sport England, not the call centre provider. This would allow the knowledge base to move with any tendering process that may take place in the future.

Sports Hub dataSports Hub has a role to play in the delivery of Sport Direct, beyond links to club information.

Firstly, Sports Hub contributes to Sport England’s targets directly in that it addresses the 65% drop-off in sports participation that takes place when people leave school (within this average, the drop-out rate is higher for women than men). By involving people with clubs outside their schools, it facilitates continuity through this significant life change.

Secondly, part of the Sports Search matching process is an attitudinal survey that attempts to understand what sports are attractive to people (to complement what they are suited to physically). This data that underlies this survey could be accessed through a decision tree created for use in an interview conducted by telephone (i.e., a call centre script). This would help to overcome the issue that amongst the target audience there may be a general ignorance of sports, so customers may not be able to say what sports they would like to know more about.

Follow-up strategySport Direct needs a strategy for following up with customers. At the most simple level, this will be an SLA that says how quickly queries that could not be answered whilst the customer was connected to the telephone service must be fulfilled. This fulfilment could be by means of another phone call, an email or possibly a text message.

Most of the follow-ups, however, will need to be done some time after Sport Direct has completed the relevant customer enquiries. Ostensibly, the purpose of a follow-up is quality control, to check if the customer was happy with the service and information they received. Gathering this feedback in a structured way will be vital to monitoring the performance of Sport Direct, at the level of individual staff as well as in the aggregate. It should also help to shape Sport Direct going forward, by allowing it to play to its strengths and/or bolstering areas of weakness.

It would be worthwhile when the first follow-up call is made to a customer, to seek permission to call back after a further period to find out how his/her participation has changed. In this way, some longer-term case histories can be established that will demonstrate how much Sport Direct is contributing to overall sporting participation.


Sport Direct

Metrics need to be established to ensure that a meaningful number of outbound calls are made, in a way that will deliver the data that the service is to be measured against. It is suggested that the contact record used by the telephone service include the fields necessary for follow-up checks. The management reports from the call centre provider can then present this information in a meaningful way to show the performance and outcomes that the service has delivered.

Follow-ups for users of the Web site are more difficult to secure, but no less important. If customers register they may optionally provide email addresses or telephone numbers, which could be used to contact them as long as the terms of use of the Web site say as much.

Alternatively, for non-registered visitors or users not providing contact details in their profiles, occasional messages could appear on the site as they browse asking them if they would be prepared to take part in a survey. These surveys could be Web-based, or customers could provide their contact details at that point, possibly with the reassurance that they would not be used for any other purpose. Again, any captured data should form part of the relevant contact record. This data needs to be able to be combined with the corresponding data from outbound calls, so that an overview is possible.

Finally, Sport Direct should recognise that the very process of making a follow-up call is an opportunity for motivation. It may be that the customer has not yet initiated participation and needs further encouragement. Correspondingly, there is a risk that being ‘chased’ could act as a de-motivator, so calls need to be handled sensitively. Thought should be given to follow-up calls being undertaken by staff with extra training, possibly as a specific exercise (as opposed to as a fill-in task during quiet periods in the call centre).


Sport Direct

Delivery of Sport DirectThe sections above discuss the breadth and depth of scope for Sport Direct, and related undertakings to learn from or that can assist in delivery. The ultimate success of Sport Direct from an operational efficiency point-of-view will depend on two factors: the choice of delivery platforms and the phasing of the service onto those platforms.

The choices for the telephone service are largely independent of the choices for the Web site, but the two ultimately need to be presented as a complementary pair for the customer. It is therefore vital to understand how the two relate to each other.

The telephone service will form a crucial part of the customer journey for many citizens, but not necessarily for the whole of their relationship with Sport Direct. The greatest value will be produced by the telephone service if it engages with beginner participants to point them in the direction of the Web site to find the information they need, and then remains available to them if they need further pointers, reassurance or encouragement.

The mainstay of the service will be the Web site. People developing their participation would be expected to use the Web site directly without recourse to the telephone service. At the other end of the scale, the Web site will be available to call centre agents to provide information to very reluctant beginners, although this is an expensive option operationally and should be discouraged.

Digital divideThis approach raises the understandable question of the ‘digital divide’. This is the notion that some parts of society are increasingly disempowered by not having access to digital technologies such as the Internet and digital television, usually on the basis of cost.

The i2010 report for the DTI13 in September 2005 claimed that this was a short-term concern that would correct itself with time, and indeed that e-Government would play a role in that change. The cost of broadband is falling quickly and the services available over it are becoming more compelling. Sport Direct should see its Web presence as part of the solution to the digital divide rather than part of the problem.

This finding was supported by the Vision 21 focus groups, which were happier researching and finding information on the Web than using a telephone helpline.

Telephone service optionsThe options around the telephone service mainly concern systems support for different aspects of Sport Direct. From an outsourcing point of view, Sport England already has a relationship with Carlson and so it is the logical partner to run the Sport Direct helpline, at least at the outset.

The domain knowledge and institutional connections the staff has built up over the past eighteen months will represent a cost saving for Sport Direct as opposed to

13 See http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/2551


Sport Direct

bringing in a new outsourcer. Even more relevant knowledge is being developed through running the EDS helpline. Furthermore, new knowledge gained through Sport Direct should lead to a more effective switchboard.

However, as has been discussed at length above, Sport Direct is more than just another switchboard, and some consideration should be given to training staff in motivational interviewing techniques or similar, to allow them to provide the encouragement and reassurance that is the key to the Sport Direct helpline.

When it comes to providing hard information, operational efficiencies will be gained by making the workflow as asynchronous as possible. That is to say that it is more efficient for agents to take queries and get back to customers later, than to attempt to answer everything with the customer on the line. It is possible because Sport Direct information is unlikely to be time-critical in terms of minutes or even hours, and allows better utilisation during quiet periods. This approach requires some capital expenditure on a workflow system, however, which is discussed below.

Taking the asynchronous model a step further would be to implement a first-line/second-line system. The first-line agents provide motivation and take queries, while the second-line agents look up and answer queries. The first-liners can specialise in motivation, the second-liners in domain knowledge. Some of the second-liners could even bring domain knowledge to the job, for example sports science students working from home.

Whatever variation is implemented, its impact on the current applications in the call centre will need to be understood and managed. Some thought may need to be given to the priorities assigned to the various different numbers terminating in the call centre, for those times when all agents are busy. Do all calls just queue up in the order they arrived, or do (for example), Sport Direct calls take priority over GMS calls?

One element of the Sport Direct Discussion Paper that needs to be addressed is the regional aspect of the telephone service. This is potentially attractive to customers as they can speak to people with local knowledge, but it threatens to undermine the whole call centre concept, in that the efficient pooling of resources becomes more difficult. Unless and until call volumes to the Sport Direct helpline become considerable, the helpline must remain centralised; if sufficient volumes are achieved then regional expertise could be brought in using the first-line/second-line system.

It is also possible that efficiencies may be gained by sharing the call centre with partners, such as Sports Hub. The dedicated staff and the domain knowledge they develop could be utilised more fully, with an overall cost saving to be shared by the partners.

Sport Direct will be a significant expansion in the activities of the Carlson call centre, and a new contract will be required. This contract should be set up to end at the same point as other existing contracts, so that it is possible to put the whole service out to tender to ensure best value is being achieved.

With an eye to the future, Directgov is developing a list of recommended call centre partners through whom Government hopes to achieve economies of scale as services


Sport Direct

are rationalised where they cannot be moved online, as part of the Transformational Government strategy mentioned above. Sport England should monitor the progress of this initiative, but at the present time it does not make sense to have two call centre outsourcers.

Contact recordThe key system required by Sport Direct to support the telephone service will be some form of contact record. This must go beyond the basic details currently recorded (such as those for EDS – type and source of enquiry) and include the following capabilities:

Storage of individual customer details; linkage of those details to CLI, so that customers can be routed and welcomed; separate record of the information given in each call, and by whom; both freeform and structured data fields available; reporting functionality against structured data.

Additionally, if an asynchronous system is to be operated, the system will need some form of workflow routing/queuing function so that recorded but unanswered queries can be found and fulfilled.

RightNow, or similarOne of the types of information that could be provided by Sport Direct is discussed above under the heading ‘ad hoc knowledge base’. This is clearly an optional part of the service. If Sport England does wish to incorporate this type of information, some kind of system support will be necessary.

Again, there is a trade-off between short term investment and long-term operational costs. A truly strategic solution would be a product like ‘RightNow Service’14. This is a commercial product that offers all the usual call centre functionality, other channels such as email, plus an innovative ‘self-learning’ knowledge base. It incorporates artificial intelligence technology to search and organise the developing knowledge base in a meaningful way, for agents and for customers using the Sport Direct Web site.

The potential of a high-end product such as RightNow probably goes beyond Sport Direct. It could benefit the rest of the call centre operation, and possibly even Sport England internally. For this reason, it should probably be evaluated separately from Sport Direct, although taking into account its benefits to this particular service.

Given that, an interim solution for Sport Direct might be the implementation of a wiki. This is a free form, Web-based, multi-user notepad that can evolve in structure according to where its users take it. The largest and best-known example is the Wikipedia, a publicly compiled encyclopaedia that has grown to include over 800,000 articles over the past four years.

Most wiki software is free15, and a package like ‘MoinMoin’ could be implemented quickly and easily with just some IT consultancy time and a day’s staff training. It would provide immediate benefit to the call centre as compared to the current Excel

14 See http://www.rightnow.com/products/customer-service-software.html15 Free of cost and free to be customised, under an ‘open source’ licence


Sport Direct

spreadsheet approach. In time, if the wiki developed well, it could be opened up to the public as an adjunct to the Web site.

SUMMARYThe following table summarises the options for the telephone service, which can be selected on a mix-and-match basis.

Component Basic version Comprehensive version

Incr

emen

tal o

ptio

n Outsourcer Carlson Carlson, with training in motivational techniques

Contact record CLI with free form call record, manual reporting

CLI with routing and structured call record, automatic reporting

Workflow system None, manual where needed Built around contact recordKnowledge base Internal wiki Sport England-wide

RightNow implementation

Web site optionsThe information that could be presented on the Web site has been discussed at length above, along with the requirement for a policy on data quality. The high-level options relate to the delivery platform of that information. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses, and they are in essence mutually exclusive – any attempt to combine them will just end up perpetuating the current situation of information distributed across Web sites in a way not comprehensible to the citizen.

One of the issues already highlighted for the Web is its lack of human touch. Whilst the objective of the phone service is to empower people to serve themselves online, some may want more ‘hand holding’. Indeed, the Vision 21 research showed significant enthusiasm for free personal trainers! Whilst this is not realistic, there are a couple of alternatives.

The first is simply to refer customers to a service such as Lifestyle Experts (http://www.lifestyleexperts.com), who are developing a database and rating system for personal trainers. This of course would be a cost option for the citizen.

The second is to implement a ‘virtual’ coach on the Sport Direct Web site. There are commercial software packages available that can create a programme for an individual and then guide them through it stage by stage. This could be implemented alongside the Sport Direct Web site, seamlessly from the visitor’s point of view, whichever delivery platform is chosen.

Active PlacesThe most obvious vehicle for the delivery of Sport Direct is Active Places. The team already has a history of incorporating new datasets and has set high standards for data quality.

Taking this forward in a sustainable way would mean incorporating the types of data discussed above dynamically, which is to say that the data would be presented as a


Sport Direct

coherent whole to the site visitor, whilst ownership and maintenance responsibility for the data would remain with its originators. For example, the Forestry Commission would continue to update its ‘Places to go’ database16, whilst making it available to Sport Direct for searching through Active Places. However, an expansion of information such as this would mean a substantial change in the character of Active Places, as follows:

The site would have to become more citizen friendly and less focused on its business users, whilst continuing to fulfil its role for that community;

it would have to optimise for search engine placement; it would have to expand the types of search it offered, to include at least

facility type and events options; it would require a more extensive back-end, to merge in the various different

data sources that are likely to be required; it would have to become more of a portal, to incorporate non-geographical

data such as events, introductions to sports and FAQs; it would have to introduce a registration and personalisation/localisation

options; it would have to reconsider its branding and distance itself from Sport England

in order to attract non-sporting visitors.

In total, this is tantamount to a spin-off and redevelopment of Active Places. Budget already exists for aspects of this work, such as some updating to the public offering and looking at how to integrate more third party data, but the total required would exceed this by a fair margin. Not insignificant within this would be the cost of procuring and/or configuring a content management system to manage textual information with proper editorial controls.

What is also significant is the increased ongoing operational burden that an expansion would create. Firstly, a successful redevelopment would inevitably lead to a much larger number of support issues. These could be intercepted by the call centre, but some would inevitably require resolution by the Active Places team.

Secondly, with a much larger number of datasets there would inevitably arise issues with data as well. The infrastructure has recently been upgraded to allow for automatic updates, but all systems with large amounts of data have problems from time to time.

Thirdly, the increased separation between the requirements of public and professional users would mean that in some senses there were two systems to maintain; although there would be a common set of data, the software that uses it would likely diverge over time.

Making a good job of Sport Direct on this platform is a serious undertaking, and not something that should be taken lightly. This is especially true when ongoing operation is considered in the context of the reorganisation taking place at Sport England and the effective disbandment of the current Active Places team. On the other hand, because the platform is fully under Sport England’s control, it probably offers the most flexibility in terms of exactly how the work is phased.

16 See http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/recreation


Sport Direct

DirectgovDirectgov is probably the most attractive platform for the Web element of Sport Direct. To summarise its features from the profile above:

Existing and planned promotional activity will drive citizens to the portal; cross-selling can take place to citizens who have visited for other purposes; easy for citizens to move on to information on health or nutrition; additional channels will be brought online by Directgov themselves; a content management system already exists for textual information.

These are all additional benefits as compared to Sport Direct being implemented on another platform. However, the primary benefits that accrue to Sport England are in the cost savings as compared to developing Sport Direct from its current position.

With a Directgov front-end, Sport England could focus on maintaining and improving its databases, an area in which it is already exemplary. The need to support and develop a public interface – Active Places (the public version) – would be removed and along with it significant cost. Of course, Active Places is lottery funded and it is unknown how flexible those funds would be if the scope of Sport England’s activity changed.

The other slightly less visible cost for Sport England in developing Sport Direct is the incorporation of new geographical datasets from other agencies. With Directgov as a platform, that responsibility would largely transfer to the tools team there. Although DCMS would lead the franchise and Sport England would lead on the Sport Direct area within that, each participating agency would be expected to engage directly with Directgov as to how to incorporate their data into the search system. Sport England could advocate that process without having to take responsibility for it as such. DEFRA are already financial contributors to Directgov.

It should however be pointed out that Directgov is just on the cusp of developing many of the facilities required by Sport Direct. There exists the opportunity for Sport Direct to help shape the geographical search engine, for example, but at the same time there must be an element of the unknown in terms of what is delivered and when. Other desirable elements, such as a registration system and proper handling of time-based data (i.e., events) fall into the same category.

With Directgov as a vehicle it will probably also be harder to present the telephone service and Web site of Sport Direct as a coherent whole. It is not clear whether the knowledge base developed in the call centre could be easily presented as an integral part of the Web site; most of the information on Directgov at the time of writing is relatively static and is created using a dedicated content management system rather than being drawn from line-of-business systems such as the ones discussed above for the knowledge base.

Branding may also be an issue. Directgov has its own branding, and it may not be acceptable to attempt to introduce a Sport Direct brand within this. That could mean lower customer recognition on the back of campaigns and less continuity with the telephone service.


Sport Direct

On the other hand, if Sport Direct is to be utilised to support other departments’ campaigns (such as that being planned by the Department of Health), it might be preferable to have a neutral brand. A compromise may be to have Sport Direct clearly operate under its own name (which may or may not actually be ‘Sport Direct’, as already discussed), possibly with its own URL such as www.direct.gov.uk/sportdirect, but taking on the visual appearance of Directgov. This is only a partial solution, however, and would mean that Sport Direct campaigns could get lost in or diluted by Directgov promotions.

There are clearly compromises involved in the adoption of the Directgov option for Sport Direct, but the long term hard and soft benefits would appear to outweigh the short-term limitations.

NCADIt could be argued that given the identification of the target audience for Sport Direct as a sedentary group who are not really interested in sport as such, and Sport England’s historical focus on people who are at least irregularly active, the responsibility for increasing participation lies elsewhere.

DEFRA’s NCAD project is an obvious candidate. It proposes to pull together many of the data sources that are thought to be of interest to citizens not attracted to formal sport. These could come from organisations such as The Ramblers, Sustrans, the National Trust, Visit Britain, Country Parks, National Parks, English Heritage and local authorities. Indeed, some sources will come together anyway through the formation in 2006 of Natural England as a combination of English Nature, the landscape, access and recreation elements of the Countryside Agency and the environmental land management functions of the Rural Development Service.

A new name for NCAD is ‘The Outdoors – Online’, and this conveys a better flavour of what it would comprise. Its current (loose) scope suggests a geographical search engine, with the addition of images of what places look like, both to help set customer expectations (for example, for people with a disability) and get people excited about what it has to offer. The project also emphasises data quality, an area in which DEFRA delivery agencies and partners are currently varied in their level of achievement.

The project was conceived to meet some of DEFRA’s own targets, and the challenges posed by a diversity review that showed a greater cross-section of the population needs to experience the countryside (Review of National Park Authorities, 2002). It is led by the Countryside Agency, but that organisation has no funds to take it forward. Despite several attempts at funding through the lottery amongst others, it remains on hold.

The Countryside Agency itself has been very successful over recent years with its own health-related promotion, the ‘Walking the way to Health Initiative’ (WHI)17. This is a joint campaign with the British Heart Foundation, with backing from the Big Lottery Fund and Kia Motors. It focused on organising local walking clubs around the country, concentrating on disadvantaged communities and people with health problems. It worked with GPs and Primary Care Trusts, including leafleting and 17 See http://www.whi.org.uk


Sport Direct

getting prescriptions of walking for people. Facilitators were put into communities to train people to lead walks and gather empirical feedback such as changes in blood pressure. Millions of people took part in the campaign, which is now coming to an end with the Countryside Agency looking to ‘mainstream’ it.

The option for Sport England is to advocate NCAD as the vehicle to meet the participation goals of Sport Direct. This is effectively the inverse of the Active Places option – NCAD would be the primary Web site and be responsible for pulling data sources together, with the existing Active Places dataset being one amongst many.

As with the Directgov option, this would allow Sport England to concentrate on its data and its users within the sports industry. It would have to reassure itself that NCAD had suitable policies on data quality, given that Active Places apparently leads other agencies in this area.

The obvious questions are around funding. Given the status quo, DEFRA might expect Sport England to fund its development of NCAD. On the other hand, one could also argue that DEFRA should fund Sport England to undertake the redevelopment of Active Places to incorporate the data of its agencies.

Whilst the use of NCAD as a platform for Sport Direct is not an obvious choice, not least because it does not yet exist apart from as an idea, it is not without merit when considered from the point of view of the target audience. However, this route would seem to require a fair amount of cross-department negotiation on funding, management and responsibilities generally.

Role of Sports HubSports Hub brings to Sport Direct some highly complementary information to the foundation geographical data. Sports Hub is a private company with its own drivers, so it needs to remain separate from Sport Direct whilst maximising its potential in the partnership.

There are two clear areas where Sports Hub needs to be incorporated into the solution, whichever of the above options is chosen.

1. Its club database will be valuable in helping those developing participation to find local support and expertise. The links being established to facilities in the Active Places database will provide the route through which this navigation can happen.

2. Its attitudinal survey will help to direct beginner participants to the best sports for them. This will need to be incorporated into Sport Direct for a seamless customer experience. Sports Hub already has ‘white labelling’ technology that could be used if the vehicle is Active Places or NCAD; if the vehicle is Directgov then it may be that the underlying data can be used with Directgov’s decision tree application. The data will be used by the telephone service as well.

In both these cases, there needs to be some consideration of the fit of data and the authority behind it. Sports Hub could conceivably recommend sports not covered by facilities in Active Places, which might then prove discouraging for customers when


Sport Direct

they try to find out where to pursue their interest. Conversely, it may be that the survey data can be expanded to recommend less formal activities that would fall into the ‘leisure’ category.

Also, Sports Hub may not have clubs relating to all types of facility in Active Places, so it will need to be made clear to users what to expect. This will largely depend on what level is set for quality. Sports Hub is aware of various types of accreditation and a decision will need to be taken as to which are made available through Sport Direct and which are considered not well understood enough to have implicit government backing. There may also be a measure of currency, to make sure that any data being offered has been recently confirmed.

Finally, Sports Hub currently holds some textual data of use to Sport Direct, such as the clothing required for different sports. It may be possible to share this data for presentation on the Sport Direct portal. If this cannot be done in a dynamic way it would be acceptable to take a periodic copy, as the information is likely to change only very infrequently.

SUMMARYThe following table summarises the options for the Web site, which are alternatives.

Platform Advantages Disadvantages

Opt

ion

Active Places Control over phasingControl over qualityExisting funding stream

Increased operational costsUncertain future of teamTwo front-ends to maintain

Directgov Multi-channelCross-sellingOwn promotionsCan focus on data & business

Poor branding optionsPoor helpline integrationUncertain tools timescale

NCAD In keeping with audienceTrack record

Does not yet existBudget/responsibility unclearNo control over quality


Sport Direct

RecommendationsIt is clear that Sport Direct will deliver the best return on investment if it focuses on its core audience – beginners and those developing participation – and their motivational and basic informational needs, delivered predominantly on a self-service basis in keeping with current trends. Nonetheless, there are a multitude of options for delivering Sport Direct when all combinations are considered. One clarifying factor is that there is no immediate deadline for the delivery of Sport Direct. This means that it is possible to look to the enduring benefits in the medium- and long-terms when making a decision.

Whether Sport England and DCMS will ultimately hit their targets will depend also on the campaigning that is done to take Sport Direct to the public. Specific quantitative research has yet to be undertaken, but the results of ITV’s ‘Britain On The Move’ campaign have shown that an approach that is both motivational and informative, delivered in an integrated fashion and in keeping with individual lifestyles, can be very successful18. Sport Direct as discussed in this report adheres to the same principles.

At the time of writing, the latest statistics from EDS show that citizens much prefer using the Web to using the call centre19. The first recommendation is to divide the Sport Direct project going forward into two streams of work, one for the call centre and one for the Web site. Not only is the demand for the Web site clearer, it is less costly to run as once content has been created no further effort is required to deliver it. The Web site development can therefore proceed whilst specific research is done into the telephone service in order to properly understand what returns are possible and therefore what level of investment should be applied.

As a best guess, for costing purposes (below), the following possibilities from those discussed above for the telephone service have been assumed:

Expand the Carlson call centre to include the Sport Direct helpline; Give the Carlson staff training in motivational interviewing; Implement a structured call record and corresponding follow-up and reporting

mechanisms; Implement an internal wiki for the call centre knowledge base and set up a

manual process to transfer any particularly valuable content developed to the content management system.

The second recommendation is that the Web site stream be delivered as two phases. The first phase will create a solid foundation for Sport Direct, with a Web site on a new and future-proof platform. It exploits existing data and some existing budgets to achieve quick wins where possible. The second phase will develop the service to encompass more types of data, more channels and more interactive features.

The third recommendation is that Directgov is the most appropriate platform, all things considered, on which to implement Sport Direct. The implications of this have been fully discussed above, but it is worth reiterating one point that could have a

18 ITV Britain On The Move Campaign Evaluation, British Heart Foundation, November 200419 The EDS helpline has received approximately 5-10 calls per day during its first three months


Sport Direct

major cultural impact and needs to be appreciated from the outset – Directgov is a cross-department undertaking and Sport England will not have exclusive control of the system, its branding or its promotion.

It is the opinion of the author that the following is the most appropriate combination of all the possibilities discussed above for delivery in the first phase of the Web site:

Select Directgov as the platform for the Sport Direct Web presence, with DCMS leading the ‘Leisure and recreation’ franchise;

Work with the Directgov tools team to build a geographical search equivalent to that planned for the revamp of Active Places, i.e., with a facility type search;

Commission the work to look at aligning DEFRA data with the Active Places dataset20, in terms of both searchability and quality, in order to kick-start the process of its incorporation;

Work with Sports Hub to fully integrate the attitudinal survey, and offer club data with the Sports Hub brand as a premier partner;

Automate the flow of current major events data; Refocus the existing Active Places Web site on its professional users; Create an advisory/stakeholder board comprised of representatives of Sport

England, Directgov, Countryside Agency/Natural England, Carlson and Sports Hub to steer the project.

From there, and with operational feedback, the following elements should be considered for the second phase:

Expand the core dataset to cover more facility types, especially those for unconventional but popular sports such as surfing;

Use the events syndication system to progressively gather more and more local events;

Develop more textual and multimedia content, including video clips to show over broadband and 3G mobile phones;

Develop relationships with external sites with specific kinds of information, or coverage of specific minority sports;

Utilise personalisation and localisation technology to benefit citizens developing their participation, by alerting them to new facilities or related activities of interest;

Link the knowledgebase wiki (if it exists at that stage) directly to the Sport Direct Web site.

This division of Web site functionality between the two phases constitutes the fourth recommendation.

Possible telephone service costsThe following table seeks to provide some idea of the costs that would be incurred in a low-cost expansion of the existing call centre. Not all costs can yet be quantified.

Item Bearer CostOngoing20 This will be less work than planned as with a Directgov vehicle it will not need so much technical detail as originally thought


Sport Direct

Carlson applicationCarlson would have to add more staff to cope with an increased call volume

SE Unknown; number of staff to be determined by quantitative research(current budget is £350,000 per annum)

Call costsThere will be an increased number of outbound calls, text messages to mobiles and possibly multimedia sent to mobiles

SE Unknown until quantitative figures available, but negligible compared to other costs

Call centre sharingSports Hub has expressed an interest in sharing call centre capacity

SH This could make a positive contribution to the cost of the Carlson expansion

ImplementationalKnowledge base wikiImplement a system to capture and facilitate the ad hoc knowledge base

SE Estimate 30 days consultancy

Carlson implementation & trainingCarlson will need to ensure their call record systems are up to the standard specified, and that staff are trained in the approach required for Sport Direct

Carlson/SE Unknown whether this would be a discrete cost or amortised over the term of the contract

Project managementGeneral coordination and executive reporting

SE Allow 20% of personnel costs from other items

Web site phase 1 costsThe following table identifies the costs to take Sport Direct forward.

Item Bearer CostOngoingDirectgov contributionDCMS will need to buy into Directgov with a financial contribution21

DCMS Negotiable, possibly from £400,000 - £1m per annum

Directgov project teamA standing production team will be needed to manage the Directgov relationship and content management system

SE/DCMS Around 5 people, maybe a total of £200,000 per annum

Advisory boardThe advisory board will meet periodically through the life of the project and beyond

Various Mainly cost of individual time, possibly some negligible travel expenses

ImplementationalDEFRA data auditNeed to understand which datasets should be used and how integrated, based on facility type and data quality

SE/DEFRA 60 days in budget, use 30 for this high-level work

Directgov search tools SE Estimate 30 days, could

21 This will cover all DCMS activities including culture and media


Sport Direct

A one-off piece of work to contribute to Directgov’s tools development in the area of geographical search

be remainder of above or come from Active Places revamp budget

Sports Hub integrationSports Hub will have additional work to do to gather facility details and share data with Sport Direct

? Largely accounted for by current Active Places work

Events automationBuild on EDS with local authorities to develop electronic feeds of major event data

SE Unknown; first step would be an audit of the current automated and manual data, maybe 10 days

Active Places professional focusRefocus the site on business users

SE Mainly decommissioning, and accountable for within the Active Places budget

Project managementGeneral coordination and executive reporting


Web site phase 2 costsThe following table indicates the areas of cost in developing Sport Direct beyond phase 1.

Item Bearer CostOngoingNew sports facility datasetsTwo or three new type of facility to be gathered, audited and maintained

SE Average £50,000 per facility type per annum

Events rolloutEncourage more small organisations to use the events syndication to publish their data

SE Mainly an advocacy role; may be accountable for in an existing Sport England budget

New contentDevelop further textual content, and targeted multimedia

SE Line of business work for the franchise production team (no marginal cost), plus some creative agency time for multimedia

Online relationshipsDevelop links to other Web sites

SE Line of business for franchise team (no marginal cost); some relationships already exist

Personalise & localise Web siteCreate new services for regular users; should take into account other DCMS activities

SE/DCMS Line of business for franchise team, but it is possible team will need to expand at some point

ImplementationalLive wikiLink the call centre knowledge base to

SE Estimate 20 days consultancy


Sport Direct

the Sport Direct Web siteProject managementGeneral coordination and executive reporting during implementation


SponsorshipFinally, given the significant ongoing costs of Sport Direct even in its tightly focused form, the option of commercial sponsorship should not be ruled out. This is a sensitive issue, however.

Firstly, the relationship between Sport England and Office of National Statistics prohibits commercial involvement, but it is not yet known how this relationship will transition to a Directgov implementation of Sport Direct. Secondly, it is unclear how a sponsorship arrangement would sit with Directgov itself. Thirdly, even if the above issues were overcome, the choice of sponsor would be crucial given the nature of the project and recent controversies over fast food and confectionary manufacturers sponsoring schools.

As the Sport Direct cost model develops this option should be borne in mind, but not relied upon as a source of funding.


Sport Direct

Appendices

Appendix A – Interviewees

Melina Greensmith Sport England 2nd September 2005

Nick Evans Sport England 6th September 2005

Simon Hardy Sport England 8th September 2005

Kate Wallace Sport England 8th September 2005

Guy Rees Sports Hub 15th September 2005

David Minton The Leisure Database Company 19th September 2005

Roger Draper Sport England 29th September 2005

Kim Gunningham DEFRA 6th October 2005

Jacquie Walker Directgov 14th October 2005

Wendy Thompson Countryside Agency 25th October 2005

Vanessa Ashby Sport England 27th October 2005

Peter Drummond DCMS 1st November 2005

In some cases, interviewees provided additional details by email.


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