UK Sport

Communicating a new strategy to transform sporting success into inspirational impact

Established in 1997, UK Sport through strategic leadership and investment of National Lottery and Government funds has transformed the high-performance sporting system in the UK to win more medals than ever before.

Having developed a new strategy for the next chapter in their incredible story UK Sport appointed rbl to help engage key stakeholders to build understanding of the critical role they can play over the decade ahead.

Insight
After consulting with key figures across the high-performance sport system it was clear that there was a shared belief that success has the power to change how individuals feel, how communities connect and how our nation is seen around the world.

This proved that the foundations were in place for UK Sport to build their new strategy upon and that to connect with the high-performance community any new strategy would need to acknowledge the reality of sport now – from the global recovery to the climate crisis, a distracted generation to increasing competition.

But we needed to go further we needed to address these challenges from the personal perspective of each stakeholder. How will it help me win? How will it sustain my sport? How will it benefit our community?

Ideas
Our solution was to help each audience understand that the answer to their question was the answer to all three. That to sustain sporting success, requires keeping pace with the changing lives of athletes, the changing nature of sports and the changing shape of communities.

In short that powering success requires inspiring impact. And to inspire impact you must power success – you can’t sustain one without the other.

With this new, more engaging, narrative and messaging in place UK Sport needed to talk in the language of sport rather than governance and to show up as responsive, open and collaborative.

Impact
To achieve this we developed a new look and feel that is at once more contemporary, agile and dynamic.

More contemporary – relevant to the here and now, but without following time-limiting trends, able to reach out and connect with stakeholders right across for the next decade.

More agile – flexible enough to represent a broader range of sports and a more diverse set of audiences.

More dynamic – highlighting and accentuating the extraordinary sporting moments, from high drama to peak performance, that UK Sport powers.

Finally, we developed a powerful set of communications to launch the strategy and the tools to keep communicating it well into the next decade.