Research from Sport England shows that one fifth of adults have been put off doing a physical activity because it was too difficult to find or book online. To help resolve this issue OpenActive aims to make it as easy to find and book a tennis court as it is to book a hotel room.
To help address this, the Active Partnership Network and The Open Data Institute (ODI) are working in partnership to embed OpenActive into the various marketing and communication channels that are prevalent locally. In order to achieve this goal, we are working together to create a learning platform from which best practice can be shared, learning opportunities can be provided and which offers a space to tackle existing and upcoming opportunities and challenges around the use of open data.
The learning community also allows Active Partnerships to identify future resources and support needed to allow them to deliver OpenActive effectively and with ease.
There is already some great work going on across the network which shows the value of using open data.
● Holiday Activities and Food Activity (HAF) Programme
Herts Sport in conjunction with the county council and Hertfordshire Community Foundation, have developed a booking systems to ensure that every parent with a young person eligible for free school meals can easily find and book a holiday activity for their child during the holidays. The solution over the Easter holidays saw more than 25 providers manage 55 multi-day holiday activities, for which there were over 3,100 bookers and 18,000 unique searches generated via the holiday activity finder.
● Opening Schools Facilities
Three Active Partnerships Greater Sport, Northamptonshire Sport and Together Active have been working with OpenActive to pilot work around the Opening Schools Facilities project and have shared the learning and resources developed across the network, this includes the work the Open Data Institute have done with booking systems to provide a marketplace for schools.
● Supporting local communities to move more
Together Active is anActive Partnerships who have been using open data to address inactivity in their communities. Their insight showed that the percentage of inactive adults in Staffordshire was regularly around 27%, and Stoke-on-Trent fared far worse at close to 35%.
This level of inactivity was negatively impacting the health of their residents and putting an unnecessary burden on health and social services. There were however plenty of active opportunities available in the area, so why weren’t people getting involved?
Following a lot of conversations with providers, local authorities and residents, it was clear that the accessibility of information about what was available locally was a big barrier. Information was shared sporadically and inconsistently, via different means and the information went out of date quickly, and was difficult to find, so inactive individuals quickly just gave up. Together Active saw the potential of open data and decided to invest in it in Staffordshire with great success. Over the last 2 years they have ;
- Developed an Activity Finder and Website “Active My Way”.
- Supported clubs and groups to open their data – through zoom sessions and resources
- Appointed a single point of contact – making the process much simpler for the provider
- Used Facebook ads to target relevant people – this generated more enquiries, and helped develop new relationships with groups that we have since been able to support with Tackling Inactivity funding
The result is a growing number of activities are on the activity finder and more people are using Active My Way which is also attracting influencers who want to support the work. It has helped build relationships with the health service and social prescribers to develop pathways into physical activity for their patients, using the activity finder as a live information source to find the most appropriate activity. The aim is to develop this still further with more resources, training opportunities and clear referral pathways for specific conditions.
To read in more detail the approach taken by Together Active click here.
For more information on OpenACtive visit https://www.openactive.io/about/