SUpporting PHE TO GET MORE FAMILIES AND MORE CHILDREN MORE ACTIVE

Based on research and user testing, a key challenge for parents in keeping children active, especially during school holidays, was an awareness of suitable local activities and ease of accessing information about those activities.

PHE had an existing activity directory within the Change4Life webpages, but this was based on static data and often included information about venues and clubs, but no information about actual sessions that parents could bring their children to - when, where, suitability, age ranges, price etc.

With OpenActive’s momentum growing and its goals and ambitions clearly aligning with that of Change4Life, PHE sought a technical partner to enable them use open data within a new activity finder. In addition to this, PHE wanted an organisation to act as a liaison with OpenActive in order to ensure the significant influence of the Change4Life brand was used to help grow OpenActive as much as possible.

The Change4Life campaign had specific peaks of traffic, notably during the summer holidays, so any solution had to be scalable to handle high amounts of variable traffic, as well as scalable in terms of geographic coverage.

imin initially supported a technical assessment and pitching session for potential activity finder partners, resulting in Played delivering a modern, custom activity finder for the Change4Life brand.

This activity finder integrated with the imin Search API, enabling PHE to access real-time opportunity data from across the country.

PHE required significant filtering of two broad types. The first was to ensure only sessions from "trusted" sources were delivered in the activity finder results, such as local authority leisure centres or ukactive affiliated organisations. The second type of filtering involved selective tagging, where imin analysed the total volume of open opportunity data available and wrote a series of tagging rules to ensure only family-friendly and child-friendly sessions appeared in the activity finder results.

PHE also required brand-specific imagery to be used, and so made use of imin's custom-image feature, using a library of PHE-approved images matched to activity categories.

Due to the nature of the campaign and the media spend involved, PHE benefited from imin's robust platform infrastructure, enabling the service to remain uninterrupted throughout the summer, handling several hundred searches a minute at peak usage.

For internal reporting purposes, imin also worked with PHE to deliver a set of custom reports to share with internal stakeholders, detailing the number of sessions, number of locations, increase over time etc.