June 27, 2018
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Press Release

Milestone for the sector as Badminton England becomes the first NGB to launch open data activity finder.

Badminton England recently launched its brand new “Discover Badminton” activity finder. The National Governing Body’s new search tool is powered by imin and enables people to find and book badminton sessions at leisure centres across the country.

The search tool was built for Badminton England by software company, Azolve, and uses imin Search and Booking APIs. This means that the people looking to give the sport a go can join the 1 million that play every month and find No Strings Badminton sessions at leisure centres, including Fusion Lifestyle, Everyone Active and GLL.

Our work with imin on developing our Discover Badminton search tool has been a crucial milestone of our digital transformation, turning our website into the digital platform for all things badminton.  Our aim is to make it as simple as possible to get onto a court, removing the pain points the badminton community have with multiple customer journeys or simply not being able to find a free court.” Martin Cawte, Commercial Director, Badminton England.

The next phase of development will enable people to also find and book badminton courts directly from the Badminton England website. This is a first for the sector as Badminton England becomes the first NGB to use open data. Martin continued: “We are excited to progress to the next stage of the project, booking a court on a given day and time which will really open the market up allowing us to communicate with a much wider badminton audience”.

Our efforts at imin don’t stop with simple provision of open data. Because each leisure operator has different methods of naming and categorising activities in their respective booking systems, imin has undertaken in-depth work to modify the data that it provides to Badminton England. It is hoped that this augmentation work will improve the user experience for people using the search tool, and subsequently help the Badminton England to achieve its goal of getting more people involved in the sport, regardless of age, ability or gender.

If you are an NGB interested in hearing more about how open data can increase participation in your sport, or want to find out more about the work we do to augment data to provide a better user experience, do please get in touch.


Dominic Fennell

Dom is a co-founder at imin