Friday 16th August 2013

From September we will be launching our own Franchisee Awards, which will be awarded throughout the year based on a variety of categories.

As part of our corporate responsibility programme we have developed the Premier Business Awards. Created to reward you personally for the hard work you put into building your business, these awards also recognise the understanding and compliance with the Premier Sport framework and ultimately the inspiration of the 100,000's of young people we coach each and every week. Not only this, we recognise that your coaches are our front line team who work directly with the schools, parents and children; we want to reward excellence in this field too.

We'll circulate more information about the awards in the coming weeks.

It was really good to speak to one franchisee last week, predicting his turnover will increase by £300k next year which is great news for him but also the network as I’m sure there are similar stories out there and we would love to hear them and so would your peers.

If you have a good news story to share please email [email protected]

Following last month’s release of our social media guidance there has been a number of questions that have been raised including:

As part of Andy Heald's role as National Coach & Training Development Office he has begun tweeting in an official capacity from a new Premier Sport Twitter account set up and monitored by Head Office with the content posted by Andy. Follow him on Twitter.

If you missed the guidance last time they can be found here.

If you have any questions regarding these please contact [email protected]

UK Active have circulated their recent round of industry briefings, this month's paper focuses on feedback from the Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee.

For more information on UKactive please visit www.ukactive.com.

We were pleased to announce early this month our community investment figures for both Premier Sport and the Golden Mile. The figures represent a significant amount and one we were pleased to publish across the various media channels.

The breakdown of this investment can be seen below.

• 6000 FREE places have been made available to children on Premier Sport community activities equating to £90,000 of community investment.
• Over 200 primary schools received FREE Health & Physical Activity Days inspiring 45,000 children to get active. This equates to over £30,000 of free sport for our nation's children.
• In total, we have invested just over £166,000 in community activities since London 2012, which is set to increase in 2013/14.
• To date the Premier Sport franchising network have pledged approx £408,600 over three years to sponsor the implementation of The Golden Mile in large areas across the UK.

Over the last few weeks we have had a number of holiday courses cancelled very late in the day, which has caused issues for both working and non working parents. Back in the Easter break we highlighted the importance of retaining customers on your holiday courses and highlighted that cancelling at the last minute creates mistrust. This is supported by the statistics which were provided and suggest a high churn rate of customers is something you can’t afford.

Please consider the actions of cancelling your courses and the repercussions it has on your business.

An outsider's viewpoint:

It was also interesting to get the view point from a non-customer who was going to undertake a planned visit to one of our courses.

"The course was showing on the system two days prior to the event and then the day before it was due to take place it was cancelled.

"It's really difficult to organise sports course trips at such short notice as I had this one in my diary for a while and have only now found out the course is no longer running.

"Please can you ensure the online booking system is kept completely up-to-date as not only does it cause problems for me but I’m sure it must cause confusion for parents."

Secret Shopper on behalf of Chewits

It was pleasing to report that our online community is continuing to grow with over 4,500 more unique customers choosing to visit the website in comparison to July of last year.

The gap between members and non-members spend continues to be significant with members spending nearly 50% more over the course of the past 12 months on holiday courses alone. The structure of member's classification is due to change in line with the new Premier Education Group developments. And we will be running a number of training seminars during October to explain these developments and enhancements.

We have had a few franchisees contact us with regard to the online projects we've been working on over the past 8 months. The most common question we have been asked is - "Will the pupil attainment records be available for franchisees?"

The answer is yes, the pupil attainment records will be available to you to upload data at the end of the Autumn term 1. We will inform you immediately if for any reason this should change.

There are a range of changes being made across the board and specific training on all aspects of these developments will be available to you and dates will be published in due course.