Forming a Partnership around a Vision for Golf

England Golf and Sport England working together to develop the experience and workforce of Golf over the next 10 years

At a Glance

Prior to and during COVID, England Golf and Sport England came together to form a new and innovative strategic partnership - to work together to explore how Golf could sustainably increase people taking up golf, whilst helping golf to become more inclusive, progressive and resilient.

The first step of the partnership was to develop a clear 10-year vision for Golf and to formulate what a partnership could be founded around.

Challenges

In forming a working partnership, a number of challenges were embraced, including:

Maintaining a collaborative working environment at a time when face-to-face meetings were not always possible, using virtual interactive boards to discuss, plan and share information
Establishing a working vision and then holding that vision in the act of sharing and understanding of insight to develop ideas and directions for the partnership to progress around

Solutions

Sharing insights and identifying the opportunities

Building ideas

Shaping possible initiatives

via a series of bite-sized online sessions. The insights included historical facts, emergent observations from across golf and sport and physical activity, and projected future possibilities.

Using a hypothesis-to-idea development framework, different communities – inside and outside of golf were explored. This enabled past and present Golf programmes and initiatives to be overlaid on them to generate even more ideas.

By using the Vision for Golf as a filter, the ideas were then glued together and formed into three central initiatives. This also included things that were happening already that could be realigned. It also gave the opportunity to look outside of Golf to see if there were other activities across Sport and Physical Activity that the initiatives could link up with, such as the LDPs.

Benefits

Built on a successful working relationship between Sport England and England Golf - Maintaining trust and respect at the heart.
Exploring a different way for Sport England to collaborate - Piloting an approach to build more strategic partnerships with different types of organisations.
Building pooled insight into shared initiatives - Bringing together collective insight to build ideas and initiatives out of them.

How we helped!

Impartial Support - Carefully facilitated, bringing out the best of both organisations, building on what works already.
A Honed Approach - A tried and trusted approach that helps collaborating partners to develop an inspiring vision and utilise the vision as a filter for new ideas.
Transferring Expertise - Sharing our expertise and developing the Sport England and England Golf team in how to build innovative partnerships.

"The enthusiasm and buy-in to develop this approach has been a real positive, particularly working closely with TAP. Also, Sport England provided further resource through other colleagues' engagement in this process, which has been very welcome."