Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
New ‘Gameplan’ resource to maximise social impacts of big events
Gameplan focuses on how to maximise the social impact major sporting events can have and makes recommendations to support event planning and community engagement.
Gameplan is the accumulation of five years’ research into major sporting events across Doncaster, by Doncaster Council’s Get Doncaster Moving team and Leeds Beckett University's School of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management and Carnegie School of Sport. Events included the Tour de Yorkshire, UCI World Road Championships, and the Rugby League World Cup.
Dr Thomas Fletcher, Reader in Leeds Beckett University’s School of Events Tourism and Hospitality Management, said: “The partnership between Leeds Beckett and Doncaster Council began in 2018 and has involved research on each of these events. We were tasked with answering: ‘what does social impact look like and how can events be leveraged for social impact in Doncaster?’
“Our research has involved collaboration between events, tourism, sport and physical activity colleagues. Such a collaboration, which has brought together a range of different interests and expertise, has led to a new and innovative model for maximising the impacts of major events. This model is known as Gameplan.”
Doncaster Council’s delivery of big sports events in recent years has provided opportunities to test, learn and refine approaches to community involvement in major events; the findings of which have been distilled into the Gameplan handbook.
Gameplan is a four-step process - Ready, Set, Go, Next - and contains 25 tactics that provide guidance, or 'helpful hows', for implementing the approach in practice on any big event.
To accompany Gameplan, 10 templates have been created to further support event practitioners to adopt the approach. The resources cover everything from how to undertake a ‘Sludge Audit’ to identify and address participation challenges, an ‘Asset Mapping’ template to help identify local resources and a ‘Social Impact Monitoring Tool’ to support collaboration and develop a monitoring and evaluation plan to understand social impacts.
Gameplan has already been well received by key partners within the sporting industry. A series of workshops are planned to further share the learning with event practitioners across the UK in the coming months.
Dr Fletcher said: “National governments, local authorities, cities and towns regularly make statements about the power of events – big and small – to positively impact people and their communities. However, all too often, these positive impacts are assumed to happen by default, rather than through proper planning.
“Gameplan encapsulates what we have learned in Doncaster about the key characteristics of ‘how’ to maximise the social impacts of big events using a human-centred and place-based approach to community engagement. We have learned that to do things better we need to do things differently. As users of Gameplan will realise, its contents are friendly and versatile. We hope it makes an impact.”
Andy Maddox, Strategic Lead, Get Doncaster Moving, commented: “Over the last five years we have been working closely with partners and our communities to learn how major sporting events can get people moving and become more actively engaged in their local communities.
“Never has it been more important to understand how to align major sporting events with genuine local needs and to use those events as a vehicle for change that is experienced by local people in local places and not just at the time of the event itself.
“Gameplan provides a framework for event planning with sustained community engagement at its heart and we are pleased to be able to share these findings with others to use as a helpful guide for their own event planning processes.”
Gameplan and supporting documentation is freely available online on the Get Doncaster Moving website.
The Leeds Beckett Gameplan team included: Dr Thomas Fletcher, Lucy McCombes, Dr Neil Ormerod and Professor Kate Dashper in the School of Events, Tourism and Hospitality Management, and Professor Jim McKenna and Jen Rawson in the Carnegie School of Sport.