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With more than eight million (and counting) YouTube views, the video ad features everyday women – not the perfectly-proportioned models that have become the advertising norm – taking part in, and enjoying, sport. But while the inspiration behind the campaign came purely from research, 18 months ago the public body’s insight directorate didn’t even exist.

Prior to its formation, led by director of insight, Lisa O’Keefe, there was a research function within the business, but its remit was chiefly evaluating the investments that the organisation had made since it formed.

Behaviour change

Sport England is a public body with three key areas of focus: growing the number of people doing sport; sustaining participation levels; and ensuring talented sportspeople from all backgrounds are supported on their career path in sport.

In 2007, the body changed its strategy to focus for the first time on the delivery of outcomes. Prior to that, O’Keefe explains, the organisation was built around delivering outputs: delivering a certain number of accredited coaches or building a number of facilities. But given that it was supposed to be growing the number of people playing sport, the organisation decided that the delivery of that outcome should be central to the body’s strategy. This was the starting point towards the creation of the insight directorate, as the team learned over time that it needed to understand more about why people act the way they do.

“It’s not as simple as: put more stuff out there and people will suddenly wake up one morning and think: ‘do you know what, I really must be more active’,” says O’Keefe. “It doesn’t work like that. We’ve come to understand the importance of understanding how people tick and how to interact with them. We’ve also come to understand that in order to get this right; yes we’ve got to understand behavioural change, but we’ve also got to understand both the supply that’s out in the system, and also how to stimulate demand.”

Before joining Sport England, O’Keefe worked in finance, which she says gave her a strong belief in the importance of understanding your market. She spent a couple of years as a stockbroker, and used that investment experience as the organisation transformed from a traditional grant-giving body to an investor, investing for outcomes.

One of Sport England’s (still ongoing) key research activities is its Active People survey, which dates back to 2005 and interviews 165,000 people every year, providing information on participation, club membership, competition involvement, coaching; and satisfaction with sporting provision. However, O’Keefe explains, the business had reached a point where it needed to know more.

“Through our Active People survey, we have a fantastic piece of time-series data. We know everything about what people do. But we knew very little about why,” she says. Given that the organisation has a remit of behavioural change, this represented a significant knowledge gap.

“There was just this huge blind side for us. We found ourselves having to make assumptions, having to really scour for additional pieces of research to try and cobble together that picture of ‘why?’. It was at that point we knew we needed to get this last piece of the jigsaw right.”

The team that was set up to meet this need includes a research, evaluation and analysis unit; a business engagement unit; a unit focusing uniquely on disability; and a behaviour-change expert. And while the Active People survey is still the foundation block of the insight directorate, over the past 18 months, the team has run a number of pieces of work focused on expanding its knowledge of particular audiences. The first focused on young people; the second on women. It was from this work that the This Girl Can campaign grew.

Gender gap

“It started off with our Active People survey, because through that we can see the rates of participation,” says O’Keefe. “That told us was that there is this gender gap: two million fewer women than men are regularly playing sport in this country, and that’s not changing, despite what we’ve been doing.” However, when asked, 13 million women said they would like to do more sport. Of those, six million said they were inactive.

This insight led to a huge piece of desk research. Sport England’s position as a Lottery distributor means it has access to data from a large number of diverse investment projects. One of these, BloominGirls, brought together 14- to 17-year-old girls to play sport, but also involved a number of fashion brands. One of the messages that came out from that event, says O’Keefe, was that ‘being sporty’ and ‘looking good’ were seen as two contradictory messages.

Barriers to participation

With this as a starting point, the team took all of the other information it had access to and started to segment the audience. It investigated women’s core values and how these relate to their relationship with sport, patterns of behaviour, the importance of friendship groups, and barriers to participation.

Traditionally, barriers to participation had been seen as tangible and fixed: sport was too expensive; activities were scheduled at the wrong time; there were not enough facilities. However, O’Keefe and her team began to realise that the real barriers to women participating in sport didn’t necessarily fit these criteria.

“We started to look at some of the emotional barriers,” O’Keefe says. “We looked at capability and perceived capability – and, once we started to get into that, we got to the point in the women’s campaign where there was this fear of judgement.”

A lot of women, even those playing sport weekly, were talking about body-confidence issues in the athletic environment, which made Sport England realise it needed to change women’s relationship with sport.

The next step was getting a creative agency on board. The team provided the firms pitching for the campaign with all of the insights that had got the project to that point.

“They were all blown away by the quality of the pack that we gave them,” O’Keefe says. “The fact that we had already established what the issue was – and had gone an awfully long way in understanding why – meant there were already a few things the agencies could test. It gave them a pretty clear idea of what they were going to do in terms of creative work.”

FCB Inferno was eventually appointed to work on the creative account, and it continued with the testing to hone in on the right terms to use, and to understand women’s reactions to the sentiment behind the campaign.

During focus groups to test these elements, O’Keefe and the team began to get an inkling of the impact that the campaign might have. “We asked women what they thought, and there was this awkward silence for a minute. One of the women started to talk about how she felt and the woman next to her just said: ‘Woah, you feel like that too?’

“Until this campaign, I can’t think of any other occasion when this sort of barrier has been spoken about. It has certainly never been spoken about in sport. Around the room, we were just suddenly bringing all of these feelings to the surface that were connected to this idea of judgement.”

Transformation

A few months on from the launch of the campaign – which has gained more than 226,000 Facebook likes and nearly 66,000 Twitter followers, a few thousand more than Sport England itself – the focus has shifted to the evaluation of its impact. This is being done in a number of ways: measuring awareness; attitudinal change; and behavioural change. It’s early days for this, admits O’Keefe, but the signs are good.

“It’s really interesting the way the campaign has resonated,” she says. “There’s visibility of the adverts, but the messages, most importantly, are getting through. Now we’re in this position where women are talking about this fear of judgement; they’re saying to us: ‘Actually, I’ve never thought about this, but this is how I feel.’

“The conversation is happening, and you can see it whether you look on social media or whether you talk to women themselves.”

The success of the campaign has also reflected on the importance of the insight directorate to Sport England’s future. “For us, it’s been fantastic in terms of cementing the role of the insight team,” says O’Keefe. “I mean, could you have anything better, to be 18 months old and to have done this?

“It’s absolutely transformed the way the business thinks and feels about research and insight – and also about evaluation, if I’m honest. We’ve moved to a world where colleagues are literally waiting for an evaluation report to land on my desk. They want it because they know it will help them to think about what to do next, as opposed to it being just a box- ticking exercise.

“We’re in a different place here as a business. When we set up the directorate, we talked about putting insight at the heart of decision-making, and everyone agreed. But now – as a result of the work we’ve done, in a very short period of time – people get it. They really get it.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2015 issue of Impact