Many years ago, in a previous role, I was asked to investigate why a new bike lock wasn’t selling (never let it be said that the world of a retail market researcher isn’t glamourous).

It was a great lock, developed to be the best on the market. The mechanism was unique, the key was bespoke, and the bar that wrapped around the wheel was unbreakable… and no one was buying it. Despite it being absolutely perfect as a piece of product design, it failed with its marketing and communication:  

• It didn’t recognise the needs of the potential user. It was heavy but the kind of people who needed a great bike lock had light, sleek bikes, with nowhere to store a heavy lock and they didn’t want to carry the extra weight
• It was over-complicated. It was difficult to explain and promote the benefits clearly and quickly, so it struggled alongside cheaper and simpler products
• It was difficult to find. It was so big that there was only room for one to be displayed at a time. Once it was sold, a gap remained on the shelf until it was replenished the following morning (this was in the days before on-line shopping).

I was reminded of that lock yesterday at the latest 'PE and School Sport Research Event' this week. This is the second time Youth Sport Trust has coordinated such an event, which is designed to bring together researchers, practitioners, and policy makers to help build connections, increase collaboration, share insight, and amplify our collective output across the sector. In this session, delegates shared some of the latest research on the positive benefits of physical activity and we spent time discussing how we could better work together to bring about societal change, before joining the wider 'School Sports & Activity Sector Partnership Summit' to discuss how our collective evidence could help inform future policy.

We’ve got some powerful evidence. We are clear what the issues are and how PE, school sport, and physical activity can be used to address some of the issues facing children, from helping their physical, mental and social health, through to developing essential life skills. So, our discussions focused on why our messages aren’t being picked up by those can effect change.

There are many issues and barriers in implementing change, but I’d argue that how we 'market' and communicate our evidence might be a good place to start. Talking to policy makers at the event, I was struck by the lack of time they have to work through the myriad papers which are published every day. Many aren’t from a sports or educational background and so can struggle with the inevitable acronyms, assumptions, and complexity in our work. They are looking for clearly communicated, simple, collated evidence, easily and quickly available when they need it.

It’s something that our Research and Insight team at Youth Sport Trust have been attempting to address with the development and publication of the 'Knowledge Bank', a centralised open-access collection of the research and evidence on the issues facing children and the importance of activity. Similarly, we published the second 'PE and School Sport Report' earlier this year, designed to be a summary of the latest evidence in an easily accessible format for those that prefer data to tell a simple story. Both are gaining traction and increasingly being referenced in new work; however we need to do more to develop and promote these.

There’s a lot more we can do as a community too: in this week’s session there was a recognition of the need for a sector-wide, collective commitment to sharing, communicating, and presenting our evidence to ensure that it doesn’t sit on a shelf (or even not making it to the shelf, to stretch the original analogy). To do this, we may have to look for help across and beyond our traditional disciplines, involving behaviour change and communications specialists, and spend more time simplifying and curating our outputs to make them accessible and understandable. By doing this, we should begin to un-'lock' the power of our collective evidence!

Amanda’s LinkedIn