The public leisure sector plays a vital role in the health and wellbeing of local communities by providing opportunities for everyone to get active. In fact, the public leisure sector delivered over £1bn of social value in 2022 impacting communities in countless ways – from reducing pressure on the NHS to crime reduction. But how do we know this? Through Moving Communities, a platform developed by Sport England providing live data based on the largest data set ever gathered for the local authority leisure sector. We spoke to Emma Bernstein, Strategic Project Lead for Sport England to learn more about Moving Communities and why it will become the go-to service for the public leisure sector. We spoke to Emma about:

• The groups behind Moving Communities

• The type of data available

• What trends the data is showing

• Why fitness operators should care

Who’s behind Moving Communities?

Sport England is working with a consortium of providers including Right Directions, Sheffield Hallam University and Leisure-net Solutions. The group is led by 4GLOBAL, a world-leading and highly regarded technology and professional services company rooted in sport. Moving Communities also receives support from sector bodies including the Local Government Association (LGA), ukactive, Community Leisure UK and the Active Partnership Network.

As you can see, it’s a big group of partners but each one brings a different skillset to the table. 4Global are the data leads, with a huge history of collating complex data across the leisure sector, they are the perfect team for the job. Right Directions work with Sport England on the Quest Service which is designed to measure how effective organisations are at providing customer service and providing support to drive continuous improvement.

Sheffield Hallam University are experts around social value and Leisure-net manage the survey side of things, specifically around understanding customer experience. In fact, the Customer

Experience Survey conducted last year was the largest of its kind in the sector. The three surveys done so far included 180 operators, 278 local authorities and 1,100 sites and a sample size of more than 140,000 consumers.

The overall goal of Moving Communities is to collect, analyse and visualise data across public leisure facilities in England. We then turn live data into insights that help operators and local authorities make informed decisions about their services.

What kind of data is available?

Moving Communities provides several different “pillars” of data. They are:

1.       Participation Data: This data helps operators and their local authority clients understand who is coming to their centre and their demographic profile

2.       Throughput: This means how often people come to a centre and the activity they do when they’re there

3.       Financial Data: This shows expenditure and income split by individual site

4.       Survey Data: Includes both the Community and Customer survey data which tells an operator about the customer experience at their sites and what non-users in their local community want to support their physical activity journey

5.       Quest Data: This measures operational performance at a facility and how effective they are at customer service

All this data gets amalgamated and presented at a local level for operators to see alongside their local authority clients. It’s important to note that this data is controlled by user password and permission so no one can see anyone else’s data.

How is this data different from what is already available?

The data provided through Moving Communities is unlike anything an operator will have seen before. There are two main differences, firstly, this data has been collected at an unprecedented scale. It’s never been done like this or in a consistent format that allows you to compare your data to national figures, other local authorities with similar demographics or between individual sites.

The second biggest difference is the ability to calculate social value. This puts the value of a facility into the context of wider outcomes like physical and mental health, subjective wellbeing, individual development, and social and community development. Based on a national study by Sheffield Hallam University, funded by DCMS and the Higher Education Innovation Fund, the social value calculator monetises the social value created by participation in physical activity at leisure facilities. For example, you can now show how your leisure facility is impacting things like long term health conditions, education attainment and crime reduction. Being able to do this dynamically on the platform is something completely new and it is not something operators could do before.

Operators can use this data to talk about the wider impact their service is having on local communities, beyond just being active, and we have seen operators including this data in bids. It is helping local authority partners understand how much local benefit operators are delivering for communities.  It also helps when talking to national partners to showcase what sport and physical activity can do.

What trends is the data showing?

Initially, the Moving Communities platform was instrumental in looking at the leisure sector’s recovery from COVID. It provided interesting data that helped the industry understand the impact of restrictions and the release of certain activities like group exercise and how this impacted different demographic groups. For example, through Moving Communities, we know that:

• Older age groups (55+) have not recovered to pre-COVID levels

• There was a significant increase in female participation when group exercise came back

More recently, the trends being analysed are around the rise in cost of living and the impact that is having on participation. One of the ways Moving Communities is being used at the local level is as a contractual management tool where local authorities and operators can see the same data and track the performance and improvement of a site.  It is helping local authorities understand financial performance alongside wider benefits being delivered by operators for their local communities

Why should fitness operators care? What can it do for them?

Moving Communities is a simple way to make the most out of your own data and translate that data into wider social outcomes. Put simply, it helps operators save time and money.

It can show, in numbers, the value of what you are delivering to your local community and provide opportunities to showcase that back to local authorities.

The platform can be used for benchmarking. This is important because operators can benchmark their data to things outside their own organisation which will help them to continually improve their operations, and ultimately, increase participation. Using data like this can create a better service by helping to make their facilities as efficient and effective as possible.

For local authorities, it can be a crucial tool to help them understand the role of leisure in their local community. Moving Communities can help them articulate this in a way they never could before. It’s a way to irrefutably evidence their impact on their contractual obligations.

How can a tool like Moving Communities help with planning / the long-term success of a leisure operator?

One element of the platform is a mapping feature that allows a user to overlay their data with national data sets. This can help them understand the local community and how it maps with their current operations. It can really highlight opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed. For example, you can overlay obesity rates of local children in the area and then use this data to do outreach to local schools near your facilities to promote classes and activities. These are the sorts of things that make a real impact in the community.

Using this feature, operators can plan ahead, see gaps in their operations, and identify opportunities that can drive additional use of the facility (i.e. income). It can also help manage expenditure by not exhausting efforts and resources where it won’t make a difference for local communities.

It's all there. All this data is available in just a few clicks.

Can you share an example of how an operator has successfully used Moving Communities?

Data from the Moving Communities platform provided a local Trust with usage and participant data that helped them develop a new product, perfectly aligned with the needs of the community. In order to attract more families from a highly deprived area, the centre developed “Aqua Mayhem,” a family-friendly pool programme at an affordable price.

They were also able to show that the social value generated from their facility outweighed the management fee in terms of the financial benefits of crime reduction, and improvements in health and educational outcomes. (To see the full case study, go here.)

How can an operator get involved with Moving Communities?

Go to the Sport England website for more information or email Movingcommunities@4global.com. We can advise you on how to integrate with the system. It’s free to use and no specialised knowledge is needed.