9 P’s for Effective Sport Development
As a society we love alliteration to try and make complex systems simple. The “4 Cs of Quality Coaching” by Gilbert and Cote, the “7 Ps of Marketing” from McCarthy, Rodger’s “4 Ps of Corporate Governance” and O'Houlihan’s “5 Ds of Dodgeball” can all be applied to sport within delivery, community engagement, governance and movie trivia contexts respectively.
The role of a sport developer however, whether a club volunteer or peak body administrator, requires a jack-of-all-trades skill set. Principles of marketing, physical education, finance, product development, sponsorship and even multimedia need to be weaved together to create environments where society can enjoy sport to its fullest.
In our work to advise sport organisations on the strategic elements needed to facilitate sustainability and growth within their community - regardless of scale - we refer to our 9 P’s for effective sport development:
People
Purpose
Programs
Partnerships
Places to Belong
Profitability
Participation
Performance
Pathways
People
The ability to attract, identity, develop and retain the right human capital within a sport organisation is perhaps the most critical element towards achieving positive change and growth. In an excerpt from Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't , Jim Collins wrote of the 20th century’s top performing businesses using the analogy of the bus journey:
‘The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.’
The notion of ‘first who, then what’ is important because the summed beliefs and behaviours of the existing community within an organisation become a prevailing wind of how the organisation exudes itself. That is, its brand and culture. If the prevailing wind internally is one which lacks inclusivity, connection, innovation, and enjoys the status quo, it becomes incredibly difficult (but not impossible) for new talent to succeed and bring about positive change.
Once the right people are ‘on the bus’, strategy can be discussed and the other P’s will all evolve – starting with purpose.
Purpose
A clear purpose, mission, and/or vision provide the frame around the canvas on which all other activities are to be painted. In systems with diverse delivery structures (e.g. federated models), it can often be assumed purposes are the same. But digging deeper there are likely to be subtle differences. For example, a club might have the broad purpose ‘to grow the sport in our community’ but staff and volunteers may have differing interpretations on how this purpose operationalises. This can create inefficiencies and conflict which even on a minor scale, impact the effectiveness of the system. Investing time in establishing and communicating a clear and specific purpose linked with mission, vision, values and strategic objectives continues to be worth its weight in gold for organisations.
Programs
We adopt Oxford’s definition of programs as ‘a set of related measures or activities with a particular long-term aim’, which extends coverage over the broad range of sport products and systems that are both internal and external. These include (but are not limited to) delivery formats, leagues, competitions, talent identification, licencing and accreditation, events, community engagement, digital, feedback systems and CRMs.
Partnerships
Sport organisations cannot succeed in a vacuum. The strength of a sport system depends on the number of mutually beneficial interpersonal relationships it creates across a variety of levels:
Government (federal, state, local);
Commercial (sponsors, financial institutions, property);
Community (schools, special interest groups);
Intra-sport (peak bodies, other orgs within same sport); and
Inter-sport (organisations in different sports)
Places to Belong
Initially this was labelled ‘Places to Play’, however Places to Belong encapsulates the role of place in a sporting context more completely. Beyond their function as simply a place to engage in active play, the places where we engage with sport hold a special place in shaping personal and community identity over time through belonging. Look at any professional sporting team that moves their home stadium, and one of the biggest challenges they face is establishing a sense of belonging for their community.
Organisations that pride their facilities as being places where people feel safe and welcome through inclusive design principles position themselves favourably to attract new and diverse membership bases.
Profitability
For professional clubs or private entities, profitability may indeed refer to net ROI for its ownership. However for the vast majority of sport organisations acting as non-profits, this pillar refers to the healthy generation of funds to further enable sport development. The importance of diversified revenue streams and operating efficiency are important factors here as well as producing healthy margins on program delivery - as long as the value organisations deliver to stakeholders exceeds the amount they pay.
Participation
Shining a spotlight on participation highlights the capacity of an organisation to deliver sporting experiences at scale. Or to flip to a customer lens - the capacity of a community to access sporting experiences. Capacity may be enabled by investments in infrastructure, but is more often impacted by elements such as inclusivity, quality coaching and program design.
This leads us to focus on enhancing the quality of participant experiences first, which will over time turn the flywheel that is the quantity of participant experiences.
Performance
Through consistent attention to the other 8 Ps, the development system will achieve high levels of sporting performance. Depending on each organisation and its unique positioning, this pillar may be measured by: win/loss ratios, divisional rankings, podium success, or other metrics. But whilst we have positioned performance here as simply relating to on-field achievements, excelling in this area requires extending the same diligence to measure performance across off-field targets as well. Targets such as gender equity, customer service, staff satisfaction, digital engagement and grant procurement.
Pathways
The interaction between the participation and performance is represented in our model as overlapping circles, with the overlap denoting pathways. Pathways relate to the interconnectedness of all programs which touch the participation-performance continuum, and the interpersonal relationships within them.
In our eyes, this interaction is the magic of sport development as it relates to all participatory roles within sport and their connectivity to each other. The pathways that occur structurally or organically from player to coach, social member to volunteer, or committee member to national director.
If pathways are tenuous and incomplete then participation and performance risk becoming mutually exclusive ideals within a sport system - either implicitly or explicitly - which serves to the detriment of both domains.
Summary
The participation and performance outcomes of a sport organisation serve as lag measures for its effectiveness and consistency of delivering positive sporting experiences. The behind-the-scenes actors (People, Purpose, Partners, Places to Belong, Pathways, Profitability) assist sport organisations across a wide range of settings to form a clear picture of the effort areas required to effectively grow their sport.
To book a chat and discuss the 9 Ps for your organisation or club, connect with us for a free consult.
For tips on how the 9 Ps can be strategically planned for in organisations, check out our article on balanced scorecards in sport.
The Centre for Multicultural Youth released a fantastic paper in 2018 exploring the nature of interrelation of participation and performance in Australian junior sport culture and its impact on diversity, available here.
(Honourable mentions to policy, pedagogy and those P’s from the marketing world we omitted: price, product, promotion and positioning. We didn’t quite have room for you all, but all are highly relevant to the sport development scene and form part of our work with organisations.)
