Community Sport Initiative

Forum

Discover the www.bigcsi.com website

Role of the website

The Community Sport Initiative is all about trying out new approaches and seeing how it works - learning from the experience and sharing that knowledge. To help spread that learning, we set up a support website for Community Sport Initiative projects - www.bigcsi.com. Although the website has been there since last summer, our recent survey of projects showed only half of you knew it was there. So we thought we would introduce the website and its features in this first newsletter.

The website has a few roles:

Helping projects find the resources you need to help you with monitoring and evaluation and learning from elsewhere;
Over time, gathering experiences from the programme to share with national stakeholders and others interested in community sport and promoting physical activity to inactive people;
Potentially creating a sense of community between projects across Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Monitoring and evaluation

At this stage, the most developed part of the site is around resources you will need for monitoring and self-evaluation. Clicking on the Monitoring link on the left-hand menu, you will find:

Background on the roles of monitoring and self-evaluation in the Community Sport Initiative and your work;
Tools to help you gather the key performance indicators used across the countries and programmes;
Monitoring and Evaluation Guides for Active Lifestyles and Active Futures; and
Links to the annual monitoring reports for Active Lifestyles (Northern Ireland) and Active Futures (Scotland).

The project survey found two-thirds of projects were keen to learn more about how to measure the key performance indicators (KPIs) on the Annual Monitoring Forms and to use their monitoring data as management information. If you would like to learn more about these, you can explore the website and then take part in workshops we will be running in May in Northern Ireland and Scotland. If you would like to register for the workshops please email Rachel Jones on rachel.jones@hallaitken.co.uk.

Other useful sections

The website also features background on the different programmes within Community Sport Initiative, useful links to agencies and documents, and frequently asked questions about monitoring for Community Sports Initiative. We will update these along with the annual reports each year.

Opportunities to network

Projects are often keen to find out what other projects are doing, especially if there are similarities to learn from. To help you find other projects to network with, we asked in our project survey if respondents would be happy to have their contact details on the www.bigcsi.com website - 95% said yes! To spread the news of who is doing what and what is working, we have created a new section of the website where you can:

locate other projects in your country who are interested in networking;
find out who else is working with the same target groups you are; and
tell us what works with those groups and read what other people have found works.

You can also read case studies about projects focusing on target groups on the case studies page of the site. A link to this page is on the left-hand menu of every page on the bigcsi.com website.

These pages will be useful to projects, but also to the programme-wide evaluation and to national stakeholders who can shape mainstream services around your experience. If you would also like to share your experience and have your contact details posted on the website, please let us know.

To see which projects are active in your country, click here.

To see who's working with the same target groups, click on the relevant links below. Where projects work with a combination of target groups, they will be listed in each place.

Get using it!

The website will be as much of a resource as you make it, so get in touch and get using it. If you have any further questions or comments, please contact your country contact:

Northern Ireland: Sabrina Allison on tel: 0141 225 5514, email sabrina.allison@hallaitken.co.uk
Scotland: Patricia Horton on tel: 0141 225 5510, email patricia.horton@hallaitken.co.uk