Our client, a Dutch sports association, is dealing with declining memberships. Sports members are individualizing and leaving associations behind; as an ‘association of associations’, the sports association is directly affected. Membership is considered too expensive by athletes/members, mainly because they do not see enough added value from the membership. The image of the sports association is at stake. This case study shows how Versatyle, through a partner, helped to map the feelings and opinions of the entire stakeholder field and, based on that, to initiate a roadmap of improvements and to organize sound steering on this.
Challenges:
- Declining membership numbers.
- Individualization of athletes and thus less focus on association and club life.
- Professionalization of a particular athlete group relative to other groups.
- Diminished image and perceived added value.
- Fragmented approach and slow pace of improvements
Solutions: Versatyle used its expertise to support the organization in several areas:
- Approach: Planned approach to arrive at an understanding of the issues from a large number of stakeholder interviews (athletes, competition partners, regions, associations, etc.).
- Roadmap: Define change initiatives from the issues encountered and create a comprehensive roadmap for renewal of competitive sport.
- Process architecture: develop a process architecture to identify where improvements need to be made, with what impact on other processes.
- Strategy operationalization: in the meantime, the organization developed a new strategy for the coming years: helped making the strategy very concrete by linking the goals to the process architecture to create a roadmap for organizational improvement.
- Portfolio Management: introduced strategic portfolio management based on the BizzNav tool to drive the roadmap and additional projects in direction and coherence aligned with scarce resource availability.
- Process Design: based on the roadmap, help design the first processes in an out of the box, thorough and integral way (in alignment with the other processes in the process architecture).
- Data cleaning and data migration: as part of the organization improvement, the sports association is going to replace the administration, competitions and membership system; possible support with cleaning and automated migration of data using our tool DataFlow, from the legacy system and any adjacent systems to the yet to be selected target system/set of target systems.
Results: Clear approach and roadmap for organization improvement, improvement of project management discipline, helping implement a portfolio board that makes professional decisions based on facts and scenarios, and well thought through effective and efficient business processes.
Applicability: With an integrated approach to strategy operationalization, enterprise architecture, portfolio management, process improvement and data quality improvement, Versatyle helps sports associations become meaningful and renew themselves in a planned, structured and efficient way. Sports associations that have similar challenges can benefit from this.
