Community Engagement Plan for UK Sports Clubs

A Sport England Movement Fund application asks for your community engagement plan. You write four bullet points: open days, school partnerships, social media outreach, community events. Tick. The application is approved. Six months later, somebody at the council asks how your community engagement is going and you can’t remember what you wrote.

This is the cycle community sports clubs are stuck in. The engagement plan exists for the form. The form exists for the grant. The grant exists to keep the club running another year. None of it actually engages the community.

The version that works is different in shape. It doesn’t have four bullet points. It has one ongoing relationship the club is consciously investing in, and one quarterly action the local community would notice if it stopped.

What “community” usually means and why that’s the problem

When a club writes “community engagement,” it usually means “people who are not currently members of our club, considered as a single group, who we hope to attract through generally positive activities.” That’s not a community. It’s a marketing audience.

A community is a defined group of people who, if your club disappeared next year, would have a specific gap in their week. Not “the residents of this postcode.” More specific. The eighty parents who drop their kids off Saturday morning. The dozen pensioners who use the clubhouse car park to walk dogs and stop in for a tea. The Year 6 cohort at the primary school across the road. The disability cricket group that hires your nets on Thursday evenings.

Once you describe the community that specifically, the engagement question becomes answerable. What does this group need from the club, and what does the club need from this group? Pick two such groups. Make a real commitment to each. Drop the rest.

The two-relationship rule

Most clubs that do community engagement well are not engaging with the whole community. They have two — sometimes three — specific relationships they actively maintain.

The hockey club in Sheffield that won the Sport England Community Award in 2024 wasn’t running engagement campaigns. They were running a specific Wednesday-evening open session for the local refugee resettlement project, and a Saturday-morning walking hockey programme for over-60s. Two things. Both running consistently for years. The award citation read like a community profile because the club had become part of the actual community fabric of two specific groups.

You don’t need three. You probably don’t have capacity for three. Two real relationships beats six aspirational ones every time.

What “actively maintain” looks like

The phrase doing the work in the paragraph above is “actively maintained.” A relationship is being actively maintained if a named person from your club is talking to a named person from the other organisation on a roughly monthly cadence, and something concrete is happening as a result.

If you can’t name the person, the relationship isn’t being maintained. If nothing concrete is happening, the relationship isn’t being maintained. If you’re doing it once a year for the photo opportunity at the AGM, it’s not being maintained — it’s being performed.

The cricket club partnership with the local primary school that consists of one assembly visit in March and a sponsorship of the sports day banner in July is not a community partnership. It’s a brochure entry. The cricket club partnership that has the club’s junior captain showing up every Friday lunchtime to run cricket games during break is a partnership. The difference is the cadence, not the size of the activity.

The one thing your community would actually notice

The other half of the engagement plan is one quarterly act of being present that the community would miss. Not a grand event. A small, repeated, locally specific thing.

Examples that work:

• The club opens its toilets to the public during the Sunday morning farmer’s market that uses the adjacent green
• Members run a Christmas Eve carol service in the clubhouse car park (open to the village, two hours, free mince pies)
• The club hosts the polling station for local elections and provides tea
• The club’s nets get loaned to the local school once a month for a free junior taster session
• A monthly “first Saturday” social where any non-member can come and watch a match with a free pint

What these have in common is that they’re cheap, repeated, and the absence of them would be felt. If you cancelled the carol service, the village would notice. If you cancelled the open day in April, almost nobody would notice — because nobody plans their year around it.

Sustained low-key presence builds community attachment in a way that one-off events don’t. The clubs whose members are deeply attached are usually the clubs that show up in small ways consistently.

What this looks like in a Sport England application

Two named partnerships, with the names of the partner organisations and the date the relationship was established. One quarterly act of community presence, with the dates it occurred last year. A sentence each on what concretely happened — turnout, frequency, any feedback collected.

That application section is shorter than the four-bullet template version. It will land better with the assessor, because community development officers can tell, instantly, the difference between an engagement plan that exists and an engagement plan that’s been written for the form. The first one has names in it.

What the chair has to do this year

Pick the two relationships. Name the people. Block one Saturday morning a quarter for the visible thing. Put both items on the committee standing agenda — not as a strategic objective but as an operational status update. The reports take three minutes each. After eighteen months you have a community engagement story that’s actually a story, with people in it, and a club whose neighbours know its name.

That’s the plan. The rest is paperwork.