She’s Ready

She’s Ready is a female volunteering and empowerment programme that started its life in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. The project supports women to inspire and lead other women in their local community to be more active.

After 3 successful years running the programme locally, the project leads Lisa Wright and Sarah Potts from Active Life for a Healthier You are scaling the project nationally with funding from Sport England and support from Spring Impact. From January 2022, the project is being piloted with 9 new organisations across England in North Yorkshire, Gloucester, Essex, Northumberland, and Berkshire. Sporting Insights monitored and evaluated the success and impact of the project.

Investigation – What We Did
We worked closely with Active Life to fully understand the scaling project aims and clarify the research objectives. We carefully considered what data they needed to capture to enable them to report back to Sport England and demonstrate the impact of their work to local partners. We also focused on collecting feedback on the scaling processes of the project to identify areas of improvement as well as gather data that could be used to approach new funders or sponsors in the future.

Insight – How We Did It
We designed a research methodology to collect pre and post-project quantitative and qualitative data. Surveys and interviews were completed with both project participants and pilot delivery partners such as local authorities, community centre coordinators, and freelance sports coaches. We also interviewed the project team at Active Life to gather their feedback on the scale-up project processes and outcomes.

We carefully took into consideration the different research audiences and their availability. For participants, we kept the surveys as short as possible by collecting only the information we knew we needed and respondents were only surveyed twice to prevent survey fatigue. With the pilot partners, we conducted 1-to-1 interviews to give them an opportunity to speak honestly to an impartial party and enable us to delve deeper into their experience and feedback. With all respondents, we were transparent and upfront on the research requirements, so there were no surprises during the project.

Action – How The Data Was Used
We analysed all of the collected pre and post-project data to identify key insights from the overall scaling project. A single report was produced which looked at whether the scaling project met its objectives, if the local pilots created an impact in their communities, and tested if the implemented national delivery model was effective. Active Life was able to share the report with Sport England and other key stakeholders to facilitate conversations and decisions about the next steps for the She’s Ready programme.

“Working with Sporting Insights has been extremely rewarding. From our initial meeting to discuss the project aims to the final evaluation, the process has been managed with the highest professionalism in a stress free manner. Hannah (Sprake) totally understood our project aims & objectives. The collection of data was managed well with consideration of the different groups we were working with. The Data produced has given us a great insight into our project and we look forward to using the findings in future programmes.”
Lisa Wright, Project Coordinator,
She’s Ready