Sport & Physical Activity Club Data
The creation of a new ‘Open Club’ data standard and process of collecting sport and physical activity club data through a simple open data framework.
The Civic Data Innovation Challenge, funded by the GLA, aims to use innovation and creativity around data to boost understanding of civic data in London. In Q3 2023, London Sport received funding to deliver a project working alongside Local Authorities to create a robust dataset of all sport and physical activity community clubs across the 33 London LAs; a new way to measure civic and community strength. Access to such clubs is an indicator of community strength as they bring people together whilst providing spaces to build trust and reduce isolation.
London Sport is now in the early stages of delivering a solution to collect this sport and physical activity club data set across London.
Our definition of a sport and physical activity club is:
A sport and physical activity club is a group of people formed for the common purpose of playing sport and being physically active; often convening in the same place and on a regular basis. A sport and physical activity club might deliver other activities alongside sport and physical activity, however, it is not a leisure centre, park or standalone programme; it is likely to be an entity in its own right, and it will often be a membership organisation.
Currently the only SPA data included in the index is parkrun data which, whilst is a useful indicator, this could be broadened to include a more inclusive range of activities. Understanding the spread of community sports clubs will provide a fully representative indication of the strength that sport and physical activity brings to communities, whilst also improving sector knowledge as this dataset doesn’t currently exist.
To allow us to better map community sport and physical activity clubs in geographical areas, London Sport has co-created a new ‘Open Club’ data standard/schema which will provide an extension to the Open Active data schema. London Sport are already one of the largest Open Active publishers (and the largest publisher of Open Referral compliant physical activity data), therefore, are uniquely positioned to work with local authorities and sector partners to complete the dataset by mapping organisations and community clubs that are currently not Open Data compliant.
Are you a Local Authority, National Governing Body, strategic sports organisation, or individual sports club?
If so, we want to support you to publish your club data!
It’s a quick, simple, easy process – and we’ve built the tools to enable you to do so.
Sport & Physical Activity Organisations
If you’re an umbrella organisation storing data on lots of clubs, you can use our bulk upload tool to quickly publish this data.
How?
- Email us to let us know you’re interested in publishing sports club data
- Complete the all of the mandatory information requested in the spreadsheet we send you (and try to include as much optional information as possible)
- Upload the spreadsheet using our bulk uploader to publish your data
- You’ll be helping the sport and physical activity sector in London better understand whether the provision of sport and physical activity delivery is fair and accessible
- You’ll be helping us better understand the impact the sport and physical activity sector are having
- Your club will appear on any club finders likely to be built in the future (therefore you’ll gain free advertising and promotion)
- We can overlay the club data with a range of different datasets to better understand the needs, gaps and opportunities that exist across London
Join our community
If you’re a founder or leader within the sports, health & wellbeing tech sector and would like to join our Slack community to collaborate with other likeminded individuals and organisations, click here.
