Sport Wales:
Our Squad

Despite the most recent School Sport Survey and Active Adults indicating that levels of people hooked on sport in Wales are at an all-time high, there is still a stubborn gap in participation for women and girls when compared to their male counterparts. In order to deliver an effective campaign that would not only engage with our target audience but encourage behavioural change, we needed to get under their skin.  

We undertook a series of focus groups with our key target audiences to identify the common factors that both prevented and encouraged individuals to get more active. Opportunity, awareness, confidence and a good experience were all factors that encouraged women and girls to get active. However, peer to peer engagement, encouragement and joint participation was identified as the most common influence.

To ensure that ‘togetherness’ was at the heart of our campaign, we created a virtual squad that every woman and girl in Wales could be part of - no matter fitness level, ability or activity of choice. The aim of the squad was to allow people to share their positive experiences of sport in a bid to bring other women and girls along with them.

To maximise the impact of our campaign launch through traditional and social media, we commissioned a video that embodied the ethos of Our Squad. The soundtrack, International Velvet by Catalonia, provided a distinctly Welsh tone to the video with lyrics such as: “Everyday when I wake up, I thank the lord I'm Welsh.” Our video featured dozens of everyday women participating in traditional sports, minority sports and generic exercise, broken up by light-hearted moments that ensured we engaged with women and girls who are turned off by intense exercise or sport.

To bring our campaign to life, we identified and enlisted the support of ten everyday Welsh woman who had particularly inspiring or interesting stories to getting active. Our campaign content shone a light on our ambassadors and their personal stories in order to bring our messaging to life and inspire others to join the squad. We adopted a multi-channel approach to ensure that their stories reached our diverse audience – from organising television and radio interviews to filming short videos for social media to placing case studies in local and national newspapers. 

In order for our campaign to have a uniquely Welsh feel and talk directly to our target audience, we created a series of witty, engaging image-led content that screamed ‘share me!’, including original GIFs. Using imagery of our ambassadors, we developed entertaining, light-hearted and unashamedly Welsh straplines that complimented each image – from ‘I’ll be there now in a minute’ overlaying an image of a runner to ‘handbags and tacklebags’ accompanying a shot of a rugby player. As well as really engaging with our Welsh target audience, the amusing content demonstrated that the ‘squad’ did not take itself too seriously.  

To heighten the feeling of togetherness amongst Our Squad, we commissioned a number of vests to utilise tactically across social media to drive engagement. In keeping with our Welsh target audience, we had ‘sgwad goals’ printed on the front of the vests with #OurSquad on the back to encourage people to use the hashtag on social media. We identified a number of social influencers, including elite athletes, celebrities and bloggers, and sent vests to them in a bid to encourage them to tweet their support for the campaign and thus raise awareness of the campaign amongst their network of followers.