Sport England Strikes £20m Deal With Facebook

Sport England has announced a £20m partnership with social networking site Facebook to help deliver a lasting Olympic legacy of more people playing sport.

It’s the first long-term partnership between Facebook and a government or public body in the UK and will use the social networking site’s unrivalled influence to bring people together around sport, and transform the way sports bodies reach out to the public in the run up to London 2012.

Central to the new partnership is the Facebook ‘Sport Hub’ which enables national governing bodies of sport (NGBs) to engage with over 20m people who use Facebook in the UK, and which will provide tangible measurement of the number of participants reached through the ‘Sport Hub’.

The ‘Hub’ looks and feels like a Facebook fan page but offers innovative and exclusive new applications, enabling sports bodies to organise and market grassroots sports events.

Facebook users will be able to challenge other people in their area to compete against them – whether in a squash match or a running race – and then share the results with their Facebook friends and networks.

Facebook is to provide an in-kind investment of £5m a year until March 2013, which will cover the development of the ‘Sport Hub’, as well as pound-for-pound matched advertising spend on Facebook for brands and NGBs to use Facebook ads to encourage people to play more sport.

Students and young people who use Facebook will be the first to benefit – starting at this year’s university freshers’ week. Sport England is piloting the scheme through British Universities & Colleges Sport and six sports. The pilot has an ambitious target to get 12,000 students participating in sport in just four months.

Sport England is working to attract £50m of commercial value into grassroots sport by 2013. Facebook is the first of a number of top level partnerships which Sport England is aiming to create over the next four years.