The abstract
Gameplan is a free handbook, aimed at practitioners for maximising the social impact of their events. It is the accumulation of five years work, research and learning of how to maximise the social impacts of hosting major events in local communities.

Never has it been more important to understand how to align major sporting events with genuine local needs and to use those events as a vehicle for change, that is experienced by local people in local places and not just at the time of the event itself.

Gameplan intends to stimulate consideration for the wider social impact that major sporting events can have and provides a framework for event planning with sustained community engagement at its heart. We have distilled what we have learned so far into a four-step process (Ready, Set, Go, Next), designed to help event organisers develop a social impact Gameplan.

Gameplan contains 25 tactics that provide guidance, or 'helpful hows', for implementing this approach in practice. There are also 10 downloadable templates below to support you through the process. The full eBook is available below (click here) and you can find out more about our Gameplan research here.

Gameplan: Introduction
An exciting momentum is building among stakeholders who are focused on disrupting usual ways of working to address stubborn inequalities by getting more people moving and engaged with their own communities. This is captured in the fresh, new ‘test and learn’ approaches being piloted at local and national levels, for example UK Sport’s Powering Success Inspiring Impact Strategic Plan 2021-31, Sport England’s Uniting the Movement: 10-year vision and their 12 Local Delivery Pilots (LDPs).

One of these LDPs is Get Doncaster Moving which is taking a whole systems approach to getting local communities more physically active and engaged in Doncaster’s inclusive growth ambitions. Agreement is growing about ‘what’ is needed to make this disruption happen.

The call to action is to adopt principles and approaches that support place-based community engagement.

This is underpinned by a commitment to understanding the way people live, shifts of power, new collaborations, leadership, trusting relationships, and flexibility. It also requires assessing the value or success of actions and events differently. However, the practical ‘how’ of achieving this shift is still a work in progress. It involves learning from practitioners on the ground who share the results of their activities with(in) their own unique communities. It will never be possible to identify a one size fits all approach, but tactics used in one context to make changes through physical activity, sport and related events can be adopted, adapted, and improved to save time for others working elsewhere.

Gameplan captures the best of what has been learnt so far from Doncaster Council’s bold collaborative approach to the delivery of big sports events. Within Gameplan we purposely use the term ‘big event’ to encompass the broad spectrum of event types and scales where Gameplan learning can be applied. This enables Gameplan knowledge to be used flexibly and applied to different contexts.

Gameplan shares what has been learned about leveraging big sporting events to maximise social impact and how events can act as a catalyst, or sparkler, that can burn bright to get people moving, and more actively engaged in their own communities.

The challenge is maximising this sparkler effect so that benefits do not fizzle out when the event has gone. Doncaster Council, through their involvement in Sport England’s LDP, commissioned a team of researchers from Leeds Beckett University to work with Get Doncaster Moving, their partners and local communities to conduct research and co-create practical interventions aimed at better understanding and optimising the local social impacts of big sporting events hosted in Doncaster.

We have distilled what we have learned so far into a four-step process (Ready, Set, Go, Next), designed to help event organisers develop a social impact Gameplan. Gameplan contains 25 tactics that provide guidance, or ‘helpful hows’, for implementing this 10 approach in practice. As the name suggests, Gameplan combines the familiar events planning cycle and a behaviour change framework called Gamification that has shaped the work in Doncaster.

A visual representation of our model can be found on page 14. To further facilitate putting these ideas into practice, we have also produced easily applied templates and guides. These are hosted on the Get Doncaster Moving website along with case studies from Doncaster, sport National Governing Bodies (NGBs), and other local authorities.

These will help bring ideas for maximising social impact to life. They are shared as a ‘pick and mix’ allowing others to select what looks useful and then make adaptations to the specific and unique context of each particular event and community in question. Gameplan encapsulates what we have learned in Doncaster about the key characteristics of ‘how’ to maximise the social impacts of big events using a human-centred and placebased approach to community engagement. We have learned that to do things better we need to do things differently. This requires moving away from the traditional funderrecipient relationship of top-down ways of planning, making decisions and delivering events, and short-term funding and impacts.

This involves a ground-up, co-created approach, working closely with local people to identify opportunities through big events to make communities happier and healthier places where people want to live. Change also means having different start and finish lines when delivering a big event.

There is a need to start planning and collaborating much earlier to understand what social impact looks like. We refer to this as Event Decentring. Event decentring involves identifying links or ‘hooks’ to wider issues (such as policy, inequality and local context) to help shift the focus to what the event does, rather than what the event is. The finishing line also needs to be much later after the event to allow more time for a Collaboration Kick-On and sustainable Gameplan Social Impact Handover Plan, to keep the momentum going. Our Gameplan provides a structure to develop more collaborative and focused approaches to co-creating events. At its heart, Gameplan prioritises achieving sustainable, varied and targeted social impacts with(in) communities.

This supports the growing movement that demands the transformation of communities through social engagement, sport and physical activity. It is time for a shift in mindset that challenges local and event ‘systems’ to deliver, measure and value social impacts and success differently.

Our Gameplan tactics set out tried and tested ‘hows’ to support building the new collaborations and ways of working.

The application of these will result in doing things differently and, more importantly, doing things better.