How Are You ‘Gift Wrapping’ Your Sport Initiative For Others?

‘Tis the season to think about how you’re marketing your sport participation programs next year - both internally and externally.

I’ve seen many great ideas for sport development initiatives never reach the light of day, because they weren’t suitably ‘wrapped’ for key decision-makers or the people they served.

For most programs, the three key brand elements that contribute to the wrapping paper are its name, logo and slogan.

What’s in a name?

Consider the following two options for naming a coach development initiative: ‘Coach Education Series’ or ‘Rising Coaches Academy’…

• Which name excites you more as a potential participant or sponsor?

• Would a certain name attract a certain type of person?

There are no doubt benefits to having a basic, dare I say it blander program name. They clearly capture what the core product is and this can promote inclusively, because it’s more easily understood by people for whom English is a second language. What becomes harder to do with these names though, is to stand out of the pack. There’s nothing remarkable, personal or emotively connective about a generic name for your program, which are important elements to be fostering in your experiences. And whilst there are ultimately bigger factors to a program’s success than a name (e.g. deliverer quality), it why all the major sports in Australia have re-wrapped their ‘Learn to Play’ programs as “Hot Shots”, “NetSetGO”, and so forth.

Take the example of Geelong Basketball in Australia. Like many deliverers in the region their club-based competition was for decades called a ‘Domestic Competition’, until they made the recent change re-naming it to a ‘Community Competition’. Whilst the competition itself hasn’t changed, the change in wrapping paper has positively impacted how the competition is perceived by parents and local businesses.

We’ve skipped a step though…

Even if your initiative has an engaging name, logo and/or slogan, someone is bound to ask ‘but what is it exactly?’ So before those elements are in place, you need to have the positioning statement: the 1-2 sentences that sum up what the program is, who it serves and its impact on them. The initiative’s elevator pitch, if you will. Bonus points if you can draw upon devices like metaphors, stories and pictures that ignite the imaginations of stakeholders connect them with your idea.

A great idea can survive on its own. But if you can put time into the wrapping paper, you’ll become a more transformational leader whose ideas connect with their community on a deeper level.