A strategic partnership has enabled Leisure and Cultural Trust activity timetables to be accessible from a central place, for the first-time.
The agreement between physical activity open data platform imin, and the UK Trust directory communityactive.org, marks a technical and mutual commitment to highlight the work and activities of UK Trust operators.
Communityactive.org is an initiative from leading leisure marketing agency Bigwave Marketing in partnership with Community Leisure UK – the members’ association that specialises in representing charitable Leisure and Culture Trusts across England, Scotland and Wales.
The Community Active directory seeks to make it easier for people to find an accessible and inclusive sport, leisure, arts or culture activity near them. The new timetabling feature, which is powered by imin and enabled by Sport England’s open data initiative OpenActive, is being made available for free to the directory’s 70 registered Charities and Trusts.
The free directory enables members of the public to filter by location to find a Trust/Charity or facility type near them. To date, the registered organisations from across Scotland, England and Wales have listed 540 facilities and has been accessed over 5,000 times. Kirsty Cumming, Chief Executive of Community Leisure UK, said:
“This new partnership with imin will enable our Members to grow the reach of physical activities offered to their communities. The directory has been steadily growing and is proving a successful way to promote both the Trust model, and the Trusts and Charities themselves.”
Community Leisure UK members employ over 46,000 staff and manage over 3700 facilities[1] across leisure and culture and reinvest their profits back into the community.
imin have committed to providing leisure timetables, which use real-time open data published directly from leisure management systems, direct to Bigwave Marketing, who then integrate them into the site. imin’s open data powered middleware, unique in the leisure sector, facilitates the use of OpenActive data by dozens of organisations, such as global sports brands, location authorities, health organisations, governing bodies and more.
imin co-founder, Nishal Desai said: “Our core believe is that we can get more people physically active by helping the leisure sector be better connected. When we heard about the communityactive.org initiative we knew we could deliver value that would support the sector and help people find out what they can participate in at their local non-profit facilities. We are pleased to join as a partner and to help increase the visibility of Trusts and Charities delivered activities in the UK.”
Commenting on the new functionality and integration, Lee Potter, Creative & Client Services Director at Bigwave, who oversees the agency web development team, said:
“We launched the site amidst the first COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, with the aim to support our charitable clients. This latest partnership builds on the technical scale of the site and delivers more user-focussed functionality; which we hope will help communities across the UK see the variety on offer from these amazing charities and discover exciting new ways to become more active, more often.”
The first operator to publish their timetables was Halo Leisure which is a registered charity and social enterprise running 22 sport and leisure centres throughout Herefordshire, Bridgend County Borough, Shropshire and Swindon on behalf of the local authorities. Bigwave Marketing and imin are working to roll out timetabling to Trusts across the site.
Visit www.communityactive.org to find a Trust or activity near you.
[1] Based on data from 2019-2020
