westminster City Council

SUpporting westminster residents & visitors to be more active.

Westminster City Council (WCC) is often at the forefront of local authorities when it comes to innovation in public services. The WCC Physical Activity, Leisure & Sport (PALS) team has been supporting OpenActive right from its inception, and has more recently been using the imin platform to the power the activity finder on the ActiveWestminster platform that launched in beta in March 2018, following the launch of its new ActiveWestminster strategy.

the situation

  • With a digitally focussed, ambitious PALS team, WCC were one of the first local authorities to get heavily involved in OpenActive and start shaping its direction. The WCC team recognised it would be slow progress at first, but that they wanted to be involved early as they believed this was the best way to change the status quo.

  • With a single main operator across the leisure sites in the borough, and with a strong relationship with lots of other providers working in collaboration with the council within the ActiveWestminster strategy, it was clear WCC had strong potential to lead by example.

  • With the goal of having all of WCC’s physical activity, leisure and sport providers searchable and bookable via the ActiveWestminster website, the team engaged Playwaze and imin to come together to deliver a sustainable digital solution for residents of Westminster and visitors to the borough.

how we helped


  • Playwaze and imin have teamed up to deliver a solution that will allow any resident or visitor to go to the site, find a local and convenient activity or facility, and book and pay for it within a few clicks or taps.

  • Through the imin platform, WCC are accessing real-time, filtered data about all classes and facilities (courts, pitches etc) from across the borough. This includes data from the main leisure operator, Everyone Active, as well as other ActiveWestminster partners such as Our Parks and Goodgym.

  • Soon-to-be-released functionality includes the ability to book and pay for classes and facilities from providers across the borough, facilitated by the imin platform.

  • The resident or visitor builds a relationship with the ActiveWestminster brand as the go-to platform to find activities. This helps WCC find out what residents are searching for and what they end up booking, whilst also building an understanding of the physical activity needs of the borough’s population.

  • What makes WCC’s approach truly powerful is the work behind-the-scenes to align all of the physical activity, leisure and sport providers in the borough, and encourage them to actively adopt and implement OpenActive standards and publish data openly. This includes ensuring all service level agreements, community use agreements, and contracts with providers in the borough include requirements for implementing OpenActive data standards and publishing open data. WCC used OpenActive documentation developed for this use case to help ensure their contracts were fit for purpose to achieve this goal.

  • Eventually, WCC is looking to even extend ActiveWestminster to be compatible with its resident MyWestminster account, which is a single-sign on used for other resident facing services in WCC, reducing the need for additional login details and centralising WCC’s interface with residents.

what they said

"At WCC we want to focus on outcomes and not outputs, we want to push the agenda forward and be ambitious…. We have very good political support and are willing to do things that are bold and different. The world is different to what it was five years ago. Digital is, and will continue to be, an integral part of that"

Eugene Minogue, Head of Physical Activity, Leisure & Sport at WCC

"Badminton England has worked with imin for about two and a half years. In that time, they have always been extremely helpful and supportive of our ambitions with excellent client management, providing regular updates and clear useful advice. They are particularly strong on ensuring the customer journey and experience is as effective and simple as possible – their advice on the customer experience for our new activity finder (based on their own work and excellent understanding of the sector) has been invaluable in delivering a very clean design that makes finding activity and courts a really simple process for our users"

nick rimmer, head of development at badminton england

how can we help you?

we're dedicated to delivering innovative digital solutions that help people to be more active.

We believe that if we change the way we collaborate and share data in the physical activity sector, we can get more people more active and put an end to the rising global physical inactivity epidemic.

We aim to help all organisations to use digital solutions that help more people to be active. We're always happy to share our experiences and to help provide guidance where we can (even if you don't end up working with us!).

Get in touch today to talk through your project - a free 30 min consultation is available to any organisation looking for help.