AusLeisure

A new service that gives aquatic and recreation centre managers access to data insights generally only available to major retailers and supermarkets has launched in Australia and New Zealand.

The service is being provided by business intelligence company ActiveXchange and supported by leading facility management software company Jonas Leisure.

It brings together data from multiple leisure industry sources to generate insights that can be used by facility managers to decide what kind of facilities to build, where to locate them, which programs to run, optimal pricing, and who to market to.

ActiveXchange Chief Executive Alex Burrows says the new service will help organisations of all sizes and experience levels to “de-risk” change and make smarter decisions by drawing on data from more than 100 million recent visits to Australasian aquatic and recreation centres.

Burrows added that supermarkets and others in the retail sector had access to in-depth data and market intelligence enabling them to stock products based on the what people in their local areas were buying, but this level of detail had not previously been available to the aquatic and recreation industry.

The new service available in Australia and New Zealand includes ‘Investment Planning’ reports to help franchisees or leisure centre managers at councils or government agencies to identify optimal investment options based on their own objectives and context.

Burrows led development of a similar service in the UK before moving to Australia, seeing it become a staple planning tool for many UK organisations as it was able to predict a new facility’s likely membership and visit numbers with 96% accuracy, leading to wiser investments.

The model used for the Investment Planning service available in Australia can identify which individual residents and households in any given area had the highest propensity to join a facility at any point in time, taking into account local competition.

Burrows advised “this kind of report can identify the 500 to 5,000 people in your suburb who are most likely to come to your program or facility, and the best way to reach each of them.

“Some may be best reached through social media, some through email, and others via direct mail. We then help operators deliver a campaign and track results, feeding this insight back into a shared-intelligence targeting model and helping the whole sector take a collaborative step forward.”

Burrows added that an associated marketing service called ‘activeCAMPAIGNS’ is also available, which can be utilised once a facility is operational, or just before opening, to help managers engage those most interested in their programs and services.

Jonas Leisure Chief Executive Mike Henton welcomed the new service, advising that Australasia’s leisure industry had been crying out for a comprehensive business intelligence service like ActiveXchange as it would allow them to forecast the impacts investment decisions before spending large amounts of money.

Henton explained “with the right data big investment and business decisions become a lot easier. It becomes possible to project the kinds of facilities that will prove most popular and which programs will have the greatest impact on increasing participation and physical activity.”

Henton stated that Jonas Leisure has always been a big believer in data-driven decision making and was supporting the new service by making it simple for Jonas Leisure software users to export anonymised data to ActiveXchange for analysis if they chose to do so.

Henton is encouraging Jonas Leisure customers to visit the Jonas Leisure-ActiveXchange Health Check to understand the kind of data they hold and how business intelligence could be used to drive and co-ordinate business decision making throughout their organisations.

Burrows highlighted that Jonas Leisure was a market leader and technical expert and working together to sign-post the potential of business intelligence was an obvious choice, adding “historically, Jonas Leisure has always placed a lot of importance on capturing relevant data that can be used to drive decision making.”

The third pillar of the ActiveXchange service, which is planned for release over the next two to three months, is its ‘Social Value Model’. This would build on the success of a similar option developed in the UK to enable central government agencies, councils and other facility managers to quantify the precise social benefits (monetary community savings) generated by the active lives of residents their facilities supported.

In future, ActiveXchange will look to add a ‘Social Value’ report to its suite to enable central government agencies, councils and other facility managers to quantify the precise social benefits provided by the facilities they operate.

Burrows concluded “this will allow leisure facility managers to quantitively measure, in a consistent, accurate and credible way, the social value an individual facility is providing and its impacts on the physical and mental wellbeing, crime rates and other social-good aspects of the communities it serves. It creates a much clearer line of sight on investment priorities.”

For further information on the Investment Planning Service and activeCAMPAIGNS, Email: intelligence@ActiveXchange.org, www.ActiveXchange.org

Images: ActiveXchange data (top), ActiveXchange Chief Executive Alex Burrows (middle) and Jonas Leisure Chief Executive Mike Henton (below).

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