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Sport England and Facebook
have announced a new partnership to help deliver a lasting Olympic
legacy of more people playing sport.
It’s the first long-term
partnership between Facebook and a government or public body in
the U.K. – and will use the social networking site’s unrivalled
influence to bring people together around sport, and transform
the way sports bodies reach out to the public in the run up to
London 2012.
Students and young people
who use Facebook will be the first to benefit - starting at this
year’s university freshers’ week. Sport England is piloting the
scheme through British Universities & Colleges Sport and six
sports, including judo. The pilot has an ambitious target to get
12,000 students participating in sport in just four months.
Central to the new partnership
is the Facebook ‘Sport Hub’ which will enable British Judo to
engage with over 20 million people who use Facebook in the UK,
and which will provide tangible measurement of the number of participants
reached through the ‘Sport Hub’.
The ‘Hub’ looks and
feels like a Facebook fan page but offers innovative and exclusive
new applications, enabling sports bodies to organise and market
grassroots sports events.
The partnership is worth
up to £20 million, with Facebook providing an in-kind investment
of £5 million a year until March 2013, which will cover the development
of the ‘Sport Hub’, as well as pound-for-pound matched advertising
spend on Facebook for brands and NGBs to use Facebook ads to encourage
people to play more sport.
The Secretary of State
for Culture, Media and Sport, Ben Bradshaw MP, said:
“Facebook has a unique
ability to reach millions of people, young and increasingly not
so young. Many of them will not regard sport as part of their
daily lives at the moment, but this pioneering and exciting
new partnership between the social marketing website, Sport England
and sports’ governing bodies could change all that. This is a
valuable way of making sure that as many people as possible know
about the huge range of activities, initiatives and facilities
we have in this country – so there is no excuse not to get active.”
Facebook’s Vice-President
of Sales, EMEA, Blake Chandlee, said:
“Millions of people
in the UK are already using Facebook to connect to their friends
and organise events around things that matter to them, including
sport. By cleverly leveraging Facebook’s tools and advertising
programmes to get more people into sport, Sport England is using
our social tool as a tool for social change.”
Richard Lewis, Sport
England’s Chair, said:
“This partnership with
Facebook will fundamentally change the way sports engage with
participants, helping them to reach out beyond existing club structures
to the young people who are the future of sport. Four out of five
youngsters have a Facebook account, so this is a key way for us
to make sport a part of more people’s lives.”
Sport England is working
to attract £50 million of commercial value into grassroots sport
by 2013. Facebook is the first of a number of top level partnerships
which Sport England is aiming to create over the next four years.
Check out British Judo's
hub page now: Sign into your Facebook account, click on the 'Find
us on Facebook' link below and become a fan. You must be signed
in to your Facebook account first before clicking on the link.
Alternatively, sign into your account and type in www.facebook.com/britishjudo
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