Participation strategy facilitation for sport organisations

Forward Pivot works with national, state and community sport organisations to develop participation strategies that reflect their sport, their people and the communities they serve. Our role is to bring the right voices into the process, make sense of what we hear alongside the evidence, and help you arrive at a strategy that your board can endorse and your staff can put into practice.

When organisations come to us

Organisations usually get in touch when…

  • They want someone to bring a independent, empathetic ear: their member organisations don’t feel heard, and the wolves are circling.

  • They’re too busy and don’t have the internal capacity to deliver a participation or Play Well strategy around all the projects they are currently delivering.

  • The last facilitator they used was boring and left staff disengaged, so they’re seeking facilitation that will make the journey fun (we believe sport should be fun for those who manage sport, not just those who play it).

  • Their last strategy ended up being nothing more than a NSO fan fiction, and didn’t translate to practical actions that impact the grassroots club.

  • They want genuine co-design: involving clubs, states and community members properly, rather than consulting them once the direction has already been set.

Bespoke strategy, no cookie-cutter templates

Every sport has its own history, structure and capacity, so we don't work from a template. Each project is scoped around the organisation's needs and budget, and the process is designed with the people who will ultimately be responsible for delivering the strategy.

Darren Anderson delivering strategy workshop

How we work

Whilst each strategy co-design is tailored to the organisation, their needs and budget, we typically deploy a mixed-methods approach with a blend of qualitative and quantitative research. Most projects draw on some combination of the following:

  1. Literature review: a review of relevant research, sector trends and your own participation data, scoped to the questions that matter most to your sport.

  2. Community survey: a survey of participants, members, volunteers and other community stakeholders to understand their experiences and priorities at scale. We’ve overseen national surveys with 500+ respondents and 2000+ open text responses, through to the humble single-question club survey.

  3. Discovery interviews: conversations with key staff and stakeholders to understand what's working well, where the challenges lie and what the organisation hopes to achieve. For an NSO this typically includes State Sporting Organisation CEOs and/or Board members, key NSO staff and a selection of key community stakeholders.

  4. Co-design workshops: facilitated sessions, in person or online, where community stakeholders help shape the priorities and ideas within the strategy.

  5. Check-and-challenge workshops: an opportunity for key stakeholders to test the draft strategy and refine it before it's finalised.

  6. Refine and finalise: bringing the findings together into a clear strategy and action plan, ready for board endorsement.

Recent work

  • Australian Flying Disc Association: National Play Well Plan development

  • AusCycling: Play Well Strategy Co-Design

  • Table Tennis Australia: Membership Model Review, and NSO/SSO "Ways of Working"

  • Australian Flying Disc Association: National Events Framework Review

  • AFL (via The LOTE Agency): Next Generation Academy Strategic Review

FAQ

  • No. Whilst our projects tend to follow a similar set of steps, the methods, stakeholders and scale are designed around each organisation.

  • How long is a piece of string? But seriously, our clients come to us with varying timeframes (from one month to one year) and we’ll adapt the depth of our design to meet any timeframes, but we recommend that a genuine co-design process requires at least 6-8 weeks to execute, and the strategy itself may take 4-6 months depending on the scale of the co-design process and board approval processes.

  • Typically the CEO or GM, key staff, the board and the community stakeholders affected by the strategy. We'll recommend an appropriate mix in our first conversation.

  • Yes, we work with national, state and community sport organisations.

Get in touch

If you're considering a new participation strategy, we'd be happy to talk through where things currently sit and whether a facilitated approach would suit your organisation.

Book a strategy conversation