Make Sport Fun

Help people to meetup and play sport

I  recently discovered www.meetup.com, which is an innovative way to help people with similar interests to meet up with each other.

People can either join an existing meetup group or start their own. These groups could be about anything – photography, web development, etc. but obviously what I’m interested in is the sport angle for it.

We know from the research that many people are interested in playing sport with others, but not in the formal, competitive sports club environment. This provides them with a perfect way to do just that. And the other huge benefit of this site over others is that it already has a good-sized user base. I looked around London and found all kinds of groups near me.

I would suggest this could be used by sports development officers, alongside other search tools whenever they find someone who wants to play a sport which they can’t find a group for locally. And if nothing exists its a great way for someone to quickly and easily find interest in a new group. It could even be used by existing sports clubs to market themselves and get new members.

Change4Life – 60 active minutes advert

The Change4Life 60 active minutes commercial is out there on our screens at the moment. If you haven’t seen it then you can catch it on YouTube here.

Logos function up and running!

The ability to add your own logos to a Change4Life poster was by far the most requested feature for promotingactivity.com. We’ve been working hard on getting this working for the past few weeks. And after several rounds of tests, improvements and changes it’s now ready!

Now when you produce Change4Life posters or flyers using the poster design tool you can add up to five logos along the bottom. This happens in stage six. It will automatically resize any logo you upload for you – so don’t worry if your image is too large to fit in that space.

As always – if you find any bugs then please let me know by email (john@makesportfun.com).

Change4Life update

Now nearly two-thirds of mums (63%) have heard of Change4Life, and over three quarters (77%) recognise the Change4Life logo. The survey also revealed that nearly three-quarters of mums (74%) have seen the Change4Life TV ads. And more people are remembering them too, with 73% now saying that they stuck in their minds. But the good news doesn’t stop there. The number of mums saying that the ads made them think about their children’s health in the long term has jumped up to 81%.

The latest Change4Life TV ad is planned to air from now, and this time they’re focusing on ‘60 active minutes’. It highlights the fact that kids need to do at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day (this doesn’t have to be in one go) to get their heart beating faster than usual. They’re hoping to re-run these in the summer to help reinforce the Change4Life message.

More detail on this and other topics can be found in the full Change4Life newsletter.

Search tool working again

The bug in the search tool has been fixed now and should be working properly on all computers.

Please give it a go and see if it works for you.

Note - we still don’t have complete coverage of activities yet for all areas. And conversely for the more popular activities it will take a while to show as there are so many entries.

Activity search tool bug

I’ve found out that the activity search tool has a pretty serious bug. If you’re using Internet Explorer 6 and click on a marker then the whole map turns yellow. This only seems to be a problem in Internet Explorer 6, so if you have a newer version or use a different browser (Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc.) then you should be fine.

I’m working with our developers to figure out what’s causing this problem and how we could solve it. I’ll send out an update once I know how long it will take to get it back up and running.

Fun, easy and popular

Anyone who’s spent much time around me has probably heard me harp on about making activity fun, easy and popular. Why do I say that so often? Here comes the science part - it’s been proven by hundreds of studies that if you can increase the perceived benefits, improve the self-efficacy of the audience and alter the social norms then you will be the most successful in getting people active (or stopping smoking, starting recycling, etc.). In normal people’s terms that means making the activity fun, easy and popular.

Fun can mean competition to one person or relaxation to another. Easy could be cheaper or more convenient. Popular means doing it with people like you.

Well that’s all great – but how do you put that into your marketing? Fun comes first – so show that as the heading or sub-heading. Easy comes next - explain how you’re making it easier for them in the main text. Popular is trickier to do in words, but you don’t need to. You can show normal people who look like your audience in your photos.

If you don’t know what benefits to promote or what things to make easier then just look them up in the communications plans on promotingactivity.com. Or use the Poster design tool – it’s got suggested messages and photos built in.