Together an Active Future

Together an Active Future

Background 

Together an Active Future (TaAF) is one of Sport England’s twelve Local Delivery Pilots.  Its role is to bring together people and partners across Pennine Lancashire to improve the opportunities for people to be more active with the aim of reducing health inequalities.

Brief

TaAF has a coordination team and small teams working in each of the six districts in Pennine Lancashire.  Every six months the district teams are asked to submit an internal ‘Sharing the Learning’ report to summarise their progress.  The coordination team then extract information to compile an overall ‘Sharing the Learning’ evaluation report for Sport England.

The Coordination team sensed that a number of the district teams found this difficult as they lacked skills and confidence in report writing.  To address this need and provide support, TaAF wanted to provide bespoke skills development sessions.

Strategy

Sway designed a new report template which broke up the content into bite-size chunks, while delivering a clear and compelling narrative for an array of TaAF projects.

Not only did we create a framework, buy we also wrote an example report to help visualise what the result should look like.

The training delivery was split up into three phases:

1. A day of training to work through the report format section by section.
2. Sway reviewed and offered invaluable feedback on each report written directly to the team member.
3. A further half-day of training to teach members different ways of formatting their document to make it more engaging.

To foster team work Sway incorporated a military style communication exercise which facilitated discussion and practical (yet fun) challenges.

Outcome

Sway delivered two interactive skills development sessions which took the team through the step-by-step process designed by Sway PR to identify, and produce, a clear and concise report.

Together an Active Future reported that 100% of participants would recommend the training to colleagues and one comments: “I found this [Sharing the Learning] document a fantastic way of getting all the information about a specific piece of work in one place”.

A word from the client

Alison Whittaker-Stewart, communications and marketing lead for Together an Active Future:

“The team at Sway PR took the time to understand TaAF and what we needed, they really listened to what we needed and tailored the training and activities to suit. Sway’s friendly approach really engaged all the participants.

The feedback Mark provided to each participant was invaluable and I’ve already seen a notable improvement in the quality of the reports submitted following the training.”