UK Sport; From Home 2 The Games

How do you persuade young people that you don’t have to be white, rich and privately educated to make it to the top of Olympic and Paralympic sport? That was the challenge we were set by UK Sport as part of their efforts to recruit the next generation of sporting stars. In partnership with TeamGB and ParalympicsGB, we developed FromHome2TheGames: a new brand, communications campaign and digital platform to reach, engage and recruit a new, more diverse audience of young athletes. We surveyed physically active young people across the UK to understand their thoughts on achieving their athletic potential. When we asked which barriers were preventing them from reaching the top of their sport, the most popular answers were ‘lack of equipment’ (44%) and ‘lack of money’ (43%). There was a perception that you needed to be wealthy to become the best. For many young people, Olympic and Paralympic sports are simply ‘not for them’.

To understand how to encourage young people to register for the Talent ID programme, we also asked our audience about what inspires them to believe in themselves. We found that sharing a background with a sports star made them more inspiring than pure sporting achievement. If we were to make our audience engage with the idea of pursuing Olympic and Paralympic sport, we would need to stop presenting medal winners as some kind of elite, supernaturally-talented alien beings, and show them as real people that young athletes can relate to.

We created a new youth-facing brand - FromHome2TheGames - around that idea, and developed a visual identity designed to appeal to a much wider audience than traditional UK Sport communications. We used a lo-fi style usually associated with zines and self-made posters and a colour palette that applied a bold and youthful twist to the Olympic/Paralympic colours. Intentionally unpolished, we wanted the campaign’s look-and-feel to reflect the kind of cut-and-paste style that young people might use to promote their own events.

Our strategy was to lift the elite curtain - to make Olympic and Paralympic success feel achievable by showing the journeys that athletes take from sporty kids in the playground to world-beating medal winners. By showing the challenges that champions overcome on their path to success, we wanted to inspire the next generation of sporting talent to take their own first step and apply for the Talent ID programme.

In order to make Olympic and Paralympic success feel achievable, we needed campaign ambassadors that our audience could relate to, who didn’t fit the TeamGB stereotype and who hadn’t had a straightforward journey to the top. We reached out to athletes and established a team that represented different backgrounds, sports and regions of the UK; BMX rider Kye Whyte; para-weightlifter Ali Jawad; breaststroke gold medallist Adam Peaty; para-equestrian Teagan-Vincent Cooke; Taekwondo champion Bianca Walkden and Kadeena Cox, a parasport athlete in both cycling and athletics.

To reach older kids (13+) we focussed our modest media budget on video advertising, choosing those online channels our research revealed that teenagers used the most: TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. As well as creating some larger audiences of sporty young people, we uploaded government postcode data relating to Indices of Multiple Deprivation to build more targeted audiences from poorer areas of the country. This ensured our message reached groups that have historically been badly represented by TeamGB. To reach younger children, we built out a ‘nominators’ audience, which we used to promote the campaign to parents, teachers and coaches, asking them to put forward kids who showed real athletic potential. We also created downloadable campaign packs designed to be printed and stuck up around schools and sports clubs to make it easy for nominators to spread the word.

We leveraged our ambassadors and partners to generate awareness around FromHome2TheGames and registrations for the Talent ID programme throughout summer 2021. Campaign teaser posts from our athletes were followed by an official campaign launch from TeamGB that was picked-up across BBC Breakfast and ITV News. As the games approached, we coordinated a programme of organic posts from our ambassadors using ‘#ThrowbackThursday and the ‘How it started/How it’s going’ meme format. We are finishing with a focus on Facebook advertising that is allowing us to drive and track registrations through our platform.

For each of our ambassadors we created a suite of creative assets that would tell their story FromHome2TheGames. We created long-form interview videos, short social media clips featuring training footage and a range of photography captured throughout their sporting journey. We applied our new brand look-and-feel and added subtitles to ensure they were accessible to as much of our audience as possible. Paired with aspirational call-to-actions, these assets would form the backbone of our website content and communications campaign.

We built a simple website http://www.fromhome2thegames.com to house our athlete stories, FAQs and, most importantly, the registration process. Along with our standard registration form for those aged 16+, we created a ‘guardian-led’ entry process for under 16s, meaning that we did not have to store or manage their personal data. Once registered, we implemented an eCRM programme that shared inspirational stories and training tips that captured the excitement of the Tokyo games and kept them motivated for the rest of the Talent ID process.

As a result of the campaign, UK Sport saw a 50% uplift in applications from the most deprived areas of the UK and 35% uplift in applications from under 16s. The campaign was nominated for and won the award for 'Best Responsible Digital Engagement with Kids' at the 2021 DADI awards!

“FromHome2TheGames challenged the misconceptions young people have around Olympic and Paralympic sport and the creative gave UK Sport a mechanism to communicate in a completely new way - helping reduce the relevance gap and ensuring the campaign was able to reach a diverse audience.”

Hannibal Morris, Business Development Manager, UK Sport