Friday 6th December 2013

Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne has announced in his autumn statement that the Schools Sport Premium will be extended into the 2015-16 school year. This is great news for schools looking to implement long term plans.

For franchisees this means you can start to plan beyond the 2014-15 school year and look for ways in which to increase your margins.

Operations Director, Danny Melling will be providing further advice and guidance on the implications of this extended period of funding in due course. 

To view the Chancellors full report click here.

We are pleased to announce that this week we launched both the Premier Education Group and Premier Performing Arts websites. Our focus now is to make the schools portal available to schools and then a launch a brand new Premier Sport site too.

Since we launched the planning framework functionality, we have received a number of enhancements and recommendations from the network which have been accommodated. Unfortunately, this has impacted on the delivery of other aspects of the project, but we are working through them and will keep you up to date with developments.

In terms of the overall project, we estimate that we have another 3+ months to integrate all the functionality from the original briefing document.

Project stats:

• 2,200 man hours spent to date
• £70,000 invested to date
• 60% of project completed
• 6 new websites/portals to be created
• Total project investment £100,000+

You will shortly start to see #morethansport displayed on all of our social media platforms.

#morethansport is our external campaign to draw attention to the activities we as an organisation, you as individuals and on behalf of your business carry out over and above our industry activities. We know that when using social media as a marketing tool, posting compelling, high quality content makes a significant impact; #morethansport has the potential to raise awareness of the Premier Sport brand with a wider audience and ultimately influence consumers' purchasing behaviours.

Here are a few examples of existing #morethansport articles -

• Working with mental health patients in Warrington. Further to losing weight and improving health through dance, patients felt much better about themselves and confidence has developed #morethansport
• Coaches involved in a school's mentoring scheme. A project like this will change children's lives, it will help them access more learning and potentially improve their life skills and therefore life chances #morethansport
• Premier Sport donating £150,000 worth of physical activity to one thousand local schools to support local communities #morethansport

If you have a #morethansport stories that you would like to share with us and our social media communities, please send these through to [email protected]. Every article featured will be in with a chance of winning a £100, £50 or £25 voucher to use in the online store. This term's #morethansport winners will be announced next month.

If you don't already follow Premier Sport on Facebook and Twitter – please click on the links below. Get liking and sharing and encourage your friends and families to do the same...

As Christmas break draws ever closer, we would like you to give some thought as to what new resources, literature, merchandise and kit you would like us to provide to you in 2014. To facilitate this, we’ve created a short survey for you to complete. We will in turn review the feedback and let you know the outcomes in early January.

New for 2014 Survey

For those investing in Premier Performing Arts, we will be issuing new emails, email signatures, from a group level. Premier Sport franchisees will also be sent adapted Premier Sport email signatures to reflect the group brand.

We have also noticed that a number of you have tweaked, amended or added to your current email signatures. Please do not do this with your new signatures as there are implications with spam filters which may impact on your emails being received by schools.

We're all aware of the importance of measuring the impact our activities have on pupils and schools. The schools sport premium criteria and the current planning framework provided to you, is evidence of this. Furthermore over the coming weeks and months we want to compile a bank of endorsements and impact measures from your schools. These will be used across all our communication channels and key stakeholders, but more importantly for you, it will allow you to use the school recommendations in your communications and sales meetings as an endorsement of your good work.

The survey link below can be used to send to all your relevant stakeholders and the results of which will be sent to you directly.

Click here for the survey

Google is attempting to better understand how we look for information on the internet by understanding how people use language to find what they need.

As a result, Google will stop providing webmasters with information regarding keywords to drive traffic. The main ingredient in Google's new data analysis is relevance. To drive traffic to our Premier Sport website and digital platforms, we need to keep conversations active and regularly use relevant content related to our business and our industry. High quality content that is engaging will encourages users to like and to share it on our website. We need to understand what our customers are looking for, what their needs are and what they are talking about in order to create relevant content. The more news and updates we receive from you and the more relevant content you create the better results we will have for our business.

Websites without relevant content will tend to go to lower positions in search. The more we develop news and content through our digital platforms, the more we will increase awareness and drive new customers to Premier Sport.

We look forward to receiving lots of news stories from you. Remember, you'll stand a chance of receiving £100 for your good news stories.

For those of you wanting to spread a little Christmas cheer to your customers, we have some Premier Sport Christmas cards available to you via the online store. The cards are priced at £10.00 for 50 with envelopes.

It's that time again and those of you wanting to get your leaflets printed and delivered early can do so by submitting your details by close of play this Monday.

The process is as follows:

1. Visit the online store.
2. Select the date and holiday period relevant to your order.
3. After submission and payment of your order please email [email protected] specifying your course details with your order number in the subject line. Course details need to be clearly added as; Area / Venue / Activity / Dates / Prices.

Click here to view an example email template.

There is NO additional design or overprinting cost on holiday course literature, providing it is ordered within the TERMS of this process.

We will continue to stock generic holiday course leaflets which can be ordered on an ad-hoc basis and overprinted for an additional charge if you wish.

Following communications sent to schools centrally, we continue to receive a number of enquiries to find out more about Premier Sport. We’ll keep you posted if one of your schools contacts us direct and we'll also keep you posted on any communications we sent to schools going forward.

As the final instalment from the Marketing Department before the Christmas break we would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.