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Communities build sport. Sport build communities Keen to know more? Say hello @KylieBates or take a look at www.gamechangers.agency
Position, position, position
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Sport is untapped market as powerful tool to serve non-sport agendas. Sponsors figured this out a long time ago. Community development and social change organisations are not far behind. A sponsor can make sport sell beer, a development organisation can make it into a education, vaccination or HIV platform, a government can use it as a diplomatic and people meeting tool in far off lands.
A sports that has not figured out their own mission runs the risk of swinging in the breeze to respond to a funder’s agenda. A sport can do this once or twice. After that they are spread so stretched and frantic, eventually snapping to go back and concentrate on “just sport”, missing out on huge opportunities.
When a sport takes control of its own position it becomes about something bigger and more powerful that people running around on a field or putting a ball through a hoop. Rugby is becomes about building character. Netball convenes women and girls in vast numbers. The doors positioning closes are just as important as the doors it opens.
The sport marketplace can be a crowded one if every sport focuses on getting more young, healthy people active. If sports figure out the saleable aspects of their product that makes them unique and consistently demonstrate the value of these attributes then they stand alone in front of the crowd.
If sports want to tell a powerful story then the story needs to be told over and over again in a whole lot of different ways. The stories of the presence of good need to stand up against the efforts to eradicate the bad. If a sport is positioning itself as being truly inclusive then it needs to partner with organisations that supply services for minority groups, it needs to make sure all levels of the organisation know how to embrace diversity, that elite player ambassadors ably represent the best values of the sport. At the same time, the sport needs to make sure it manages the risk of incidents of the sport not being inclusive.
This is a long game. If a sport knows what it wants and is prepared to tell the story over and over again, they put them in a powerful position to choose partners, authentically contribute and create an eco system that ultimately, builds the sport.
