All Saints & Blakenhall Community Development (ABCD), Wolverhampton's New Deal for Communities is, having worked with KKP to produce the its Sport & Recreation Strategy (2006-11), now employing the Company's market research expertise to develop a baseline from which to drive sport & recreation within the area.

A key objective of the strategy is performance measurement - to monitor levels of participation in sport and physical activity as well as the awareness of, and satisfaction among, ABCD residents about the quality and impact of sport and physical activity provision and interventions.

KKP is delighted to be working with ABCD to establish and deliver its performance measurement system. The practice, which boasts an extensive market research arm will:

• Work in partnership with ABCD to develop a system to measure levels of participation and awareness of sport and physical activity amongst ABCD residents. 
• Create, print and distribute ‘schools survey' questionnaires within consenting schools alongside a ‘community survey' designed to secure responses from local residents - via households.
• Analyse and report on the findings from the responses of the results and make specific recommendations in relation to future ABCD plans and programmes.

The analysis will incorporate substantial GIS mapping to provide pictorial maps of the survey responses and data. This is a key analytical tool to support performance measurement and to make it easier to understand and interpret data. KKP's GIS experts are recognised as leading industry specialists in this field. They manipulate raw data in a variety of forms to get the most from information gathered.

Since 2002, KKP has delivered similar paper and web-based sport and physical activity participation surveys for over 100 clients. Complementing Government data such as ‘Active People' and the PESSCL school sport surveys', the KKP Strata Survey is one of the most comprehensive datasets in the UK. In addition to the proven value of the data itself, it has the added benefit of enabling clients to compare their results with the responses of 200,000 young people across the UK.

There is increasing pressure on organisations such as county sports partnerships, local authorities, LEAs/children's and young people's services and PCTs to support Government aims. All face the target to increase participation in sport and active recreation by 1% each year, and more importantly, to demonstrate that such targets are being achieved.

KKP's work will ensure that ABCD's performance measurement system will provide evidence on a range of factors, such as:

• Levels of physical competence/abilities (specifically swimming among young people) 
• Frequency and duration of participation in sport among young people - in, after and out of school/ college
• Frequency and duration of participation in sport and physical activity among all people and the activities in which they are involved.
• Awareness of sporting opportunity.
• Views on the standard of sporting opportunity/provision.
• Participation variation; by age, gender, ethnic group, disability, social class, school attended, family, car ownership and where people live? 
• Key influences and barriers that prevent children and adults from taking part
• Levels of club membership
• Other health indicators including smoking and alcohol

This evidence will be used by ABCD to determine the initial areas and schemes in which it will invest during its final years and to underpin its investment with more detailed outcome requirements and specific short, medium and longer-term targets related to both direct community-based interventions and the agency change agenda that will support the delivery of longer-term programmes.

For further details, please contact Peter Millward, Principal Consultant (peter.millward@kkp.co.uk)