Xn integrates South Gloucestershire Leisure with the community

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For the UK's councils and sports and leisure trusts, the Active Card initiative seems on the face of it to be just what the resident or customer needs: a simple way of accessing sports clubs, leisure centres and libraries, even public transport and surgeries. Used to identify the cardholder each time they use one of these facilities in a given region, the data is recorded, the database updated and the council department or trust can then generate reports whenever required to prove the levels of attendance and analyse the data to sharpen their marketing. In fact, from the customers' perspective, the Active Card is ideal.

But as anyone involved in managing public sports and cultural amenities will readily tell you, there's a lot more to it and especially where the technology is concerned and that's usually where initiatives like the Active card or Free Swim can create far more technology challenges than may appear to be the case.

The complexities behind the Active Card...

If for example, you live in the South Gloucestershire local authority region, there's potentially a lot you can do with an Active Card: there are five large leisure centres, each with a variety of different activities on offer to customers (and each of which needs to be identified when used by someone). Then there are thirteen libraries, numerous Health Centres, one hundred and four schools, and three hundred or so accredited sports clubs offering a huge range of different sports activities.

All these are facilities that can be accessed by and promoted to anyone living in the South Gloucestershire region. But it makes much more sense if a card holder can be pushed towards those in his or her locality, so you immediately have a data collection, identification and selection issue. Then there are technical differences: the libraries operate barcode identification systems, whereas the sports and leisure centres use swipe systems. There again, the database software for the libraries is quite different to that used for the sports and leisure centres. And that's just for starters.

Targeting 11,000 people across gender, age, interests, postcodes

If the council wants to mail shot 11,000 customers, it wants to target them as accurately as possible. A lady aged sixty years and over won't be very interested in knowing all about the 5-a-side football league, but will be very interested in knowing about activities that are specially designed for ladies that 60+, especially if there's one being run at a place nearby. So name, age group, gender, interests, post code are all essential pieces of information to be gathered on each and every customer. In the South Gloucestershire region, that's 11,000 so far and they're aiming to target 38% of the 250,000 residents to be using Active Cards by 2011...

So you have all sorts of different activities that thousands of residents can access which you need to record, each with different data needs, plus different database software at the different types of facilities, and your job is to pull all this together so that it works for the Active Card holders and for the Council. Impossible? Not if you're using Xn.

So how does South Gloucestershire do it?

Pete Eastwood is the Partnership and Project Manager for South Gloucestershire Leisure, and he's responsible for precisely what has been outlined above. Driven by the aim of making it as easy as possible for people in the region to access and enjoy any of the community sporting and cultural amenities on offer, he has worked in partnership with Xn Leisure to achieve both simplicity for the card holders, and targeting of customers that almost defies belief: different users can be mailed different types of information that Pete's IT systems know will be of interest to them. And despite all the technical differences, the software runs smoothly between each of the different databases and access systems to ensure that Pete and his team have all the data they need. It's no idle boast, either: according to the exception reports generated by the Xn software, Pete's department's user database of 11,000 individuals is 95% clean and getting better each time it's used.

Updating everything across all systems in under 10 minutes

This saves huge amounts of time and money, either in terms of staff resource spent manually pulling vast amounts of data together for a report or mailshot, or in terms of re-equipping all the amenities with matching software. But the system is so effective, that within ten minutes of a new piece of data being recorded, such as a change of post code from a leisure centre user, the card holder's details have already been updated by the time they go to take out a new book at their local library. If the library is based in a Leisure Centre, such as at Bradley Stoke, the update applies to any of the other facilities that the card holder may happen to access and use on that visit. That is spectacularly quick, an impressive technical achievement, and avoids all the operational problems that would otherwise happen.

Personalised communications

When it comes to mailshots, the impact is even more impressive: a printed flyer can start with a Hi Michael or Hi Samantha because it knows the name details, and tell him or her about local things of interest to me given my age group because it knows their gender, age, postcode and interests and activities. That degree of personalisation makes a consumer far more likely to act upon receiving a communication from South Gloucestershire Leisure.

So what does Pete Eastwood think of it so far?

Pete Eastwood: "We're targeting 95,000 residents to become card holders, aiming to have 38% of the regional population on board with the Active Card initiative. That will be around 30% better than any other participating body."

"We're setting very high goals, but the simple fact is that by working closely with our partner to develop solutions that deal with every challenge we've identified, we've already proven what is possible. We know we are gathering the best level of detailed data, and turning this into the most effective form of targeting. We can spend gbp 10,000 on a mailshot with a very high level of confidence that for 95% of those who receive it, it will feel like a personal communication to them - and just to them."

"We're going to achieve all this without needing huge and expensive additional resources, while keeping it all wonderfully simple and easy for the card holders, our residents and customers. That is making South Gloucestershire Leisure look very professional, very effective, very good value, and helps us get more people, more active, more often."