BUSINESS UPDATE To LTA Councillors From Scott Lloyd Purpose of paper To provide a business update Date 2 December 2020 Confidentiality Can be shared with County / Association Committee Participation (OS) The upward trend in once-a-year participation has continued through the autumn months; the end of October reporting that nearly 4m people across GB have played tennis at least once in the last year – this is versus an original target of 3.6m and a revised target for 2020 of 3.8m. The growth in once a month participation flattened in October and given lockdown in November we will now not hit our target of 1.4m. The target for once a week kid’s participation will report in December as part of Sport England’s Active Lives Kids Survey (Appendix 1 – Business Dashboard). The team have done a good job in continuing to drive adoption of Rally and Gate Access systems as part of the cross business approach to the accessibility strategy. There is a further opportunity to drive adoption of Rally with the planned ‘Weather the Court’ winter player retention campaign, which will go live once tennis can be played post lockdown. Furthermore, good progress has been made against a number of key strategic deliverables including; venue adoption of gate access systems, the new competition management system, the integration of and growth plan for Local Tennis Leagues, the new venue registration proposition, further development of the club support toolkit which is at the forefront of the autumn forums, as well as the re-launch of our important SERVES and Open Court programmes. Sport England Our relationship with Sport England continues to be strong. This was going to be the final year of their funding cycle but, as a result of COVID, they have agreed to roll-forward the same funding amount as this year for 2021-22. We will shortly be agreeing with them how this money will be spent and what objectives we will need to report against in return for the funding. Our delayed end-year performance review went well and, on the back of that meeting and discussion around driving good governance down through County & Island Associations, they agreed to provide extra funding of £15k to support the consultation process and governance framework development with Counties (see further update below). They are in the process of finishing the consultation process around their new 10-year strategy, which will be published early in the new year. We have already engaged extensively on the development of the strategy so far, but will also be inputting into this final stage in the next couple of weeks. This strategy is expected to focus significantly on addressing stubborn inequalities in participation in sport and physical activity. It will drive funding from 2022-23 onwards and our “bid” into the next funding cycle will be a key focus for next year. Regional delivery Since the last report, the Regional Teams have been focussing on delivering the revised post-COVID dashboard measures as well as continuing to provide key club and venue support services. However, since the beginning of November we have been operating at reduced capacity with nearly half the teams on furlough. In this context, the teams have done an excellent job to: o deliver a wide range of club forums with over 50 webinars covering 14 different topics ranging from Governance, to Court Utilisation and Programming, to Social Media and Marketing, and with over 1,400 attendees currently booked to attend so far; o continue to drive venues to adopt Rally – with 900 venues adopting Rally versus a target of 650; o increase the rate of Gate Access approvals in each of the months since the last Board report – in spite of the challenges faced as a result of local authorities being understandably focussed on other things – with a strong pipeline of potential sites being built for Q1 and further into 2021; o find innovative ways of delivering services to clubs, coaches and players – including working very quickly with the COO Directorate to be able to shift all coach training in LTA Youth on line; innovating delivery in the provision of She Rallies courses in order to hit the target for the year; and, until the lockdown started, being on track to get at least 75% of Open Court and SERVES venues back up and running on the programme. The focus through to the end of the year will be primarily on: o ensuring as many of the remaining dashboard targets which are able to be delivered in spite of lockdown are fully achieved – including supporting venues and coaches during the Venue Registration (and associated Safeguarding standards) process; o planning for 2021 delivery in as flexible and cost-efficient a way as possible, including bottom-up target generation; o reviewing delivery performance in 2020 and using the outputs to plan and implement a continuous improvement plan for the regional teams addressing identified skills gaps; o ensuring there is an effective pipeline of activity with local authorities for 2021 in order to achieve continued growth with the accessibility strategy. Clubs, Counties and Volunteering We continue to focus on delivering Venue Registration and our calendar of Club Forum Webinars, as well as kick starting the new County Governance Reform Project. All of these projects are supported by TDC work streams, which have been very helpful in terms of ongoing engagement. Venue Registration has been developed with careful consideration to complement both the new LTA Membership and Wimbledon Ticketing Review projects to drive towards our strategic objectives. An obvious example of this is the new Volunteer ballot which spans all three projects, from nominating volunteers through Registration to volunteers opting in via the new Membership portal, to the balloting and allocation of volunteer tickets. The launch of the new LTA Venue Registration proposition was slightly delayed, meaning it was agreed to push timelines out to tolerable limits to cater for the overrun. An aligned communications plan has been deployed to mitigate the risks associated with the delay and as of the 23 November over 600 venues have successfully registered and a further circa 1,000 are in progress, with a further launch to LA’s and new park and education sites planned for 26th November. The club support toolkit is complete, offering guidance, practical resources and wherever relevant, partners who can support clubs across the areas of; governance & management, membership growth, membership retention, programming & court utilisation and financial sustainability. All of this support is being brought to life through a calendar of club webinars that are running throughout October and November. As well as our own content, some sessions have been delivered by our Digital partner, Deloitte, to support clubs improve their digital skills and capabilities. A handful of Counties have also delivered their own webinars to discuss local issues and reinforce some of the support available. We’ve had over 1,400 bookings to date and initial feedback tells us that 99% of attendees thought the content was relevant and 87% would likely recommend the content to another club. We’ll continue to deliver the remaining sessions and then review ahead of developing our programme of support for 2021. Our plans for volunteer engagement were been put on hold this year due to COVID-19, however we have kicked off a new project around County & Island Association Governance Reform, which will look at the role of the Counties, implementing a new County Governance Framework, putting in place a County Registration process as well as reviewing and overhauling the current county funding model. We’ve appointed Counsel, an independent party to support with a consultation exercise, as we want to ensure all Counties are given the opportunity to feed into the process and ultimately the co-creation of a new County Governance Framework. We expect the consultation to kick off during December and into January. We have also started the LTA Awards process for 2021, with nominations closing on the 15th November. Finally, the club health and volunteer engagement surveys are back up and running and we’ve seen some strong results in the last three months. Our year-end target is an average across the year, and we hope to keep the positive momentum going through the club webinars and ongoing engagement through the regional delivery team and targeted communications. Parks and Community Tennis Continuing work on the Gate Access Project has seen the number of venues receiving an installation increase. Excellent cross functional work has continued to ‘unlock’ some key Local Authorities, with Bedford and Birmingham being of particular note as LA’s who were previously not engaging with this opportunity but are now bought in, and working on applications. The number of venues making courts or coaching sessions available to book on Rally has increased to over 900, which is broken down in to 720 venues offering courts on a ‘Pay and Play’ or ‘Free to Play’ basis to members of the public, and 193 venues offering coaching sessions. There are also a further 279 coaching organisations making sessions available to the general public on Rally. Encouragingly these numbers have continued to rise steadily over the autumn and winter period, following a sharper increase in the summer months. Involvement in the ‘Weather the Court’ campaign will encourage venues continued engagement with LTA Rally, with players who re-connected with tennis in the summer continuing to book courts throughout the winter months via the Rally platform. Tennis For Free relaunched 31 sites, with another 7 scheduled and a small number of immediate potential opportunities identified, when their progress was halted by the second lockdown, tracking slightly below target of 35 for end of Oct.