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Digital transformation – join the journey

Our strategic lead for innovation and digital analyses the results of the latest Digital Futures 2024 report, released by us and ukactive in November 2024.

23rd December 2024

by Allison Savich
Strategic lead for innovation and digital, Sport England

Sport England and ukactive recently released the latest Digital Futures report, marking a successful fourth year of consultation.

It’s incredible to think that four years ago we didn’t have a true sense of our digital maturity as a sector, whereas now we’re at a place where we can see clear trends and focus areas for our future efforts.  

There are gaps that our sector needs to address, including the need for leveraging data and insights to deliver your business strategy, the importance of considering our organisations’ environmental impact as we invest in digital and the need to start to embed emerging technologies like open data and AI.

We are incredibly grateful to the 295 organisations that took part in the consultation by allowing us to understand their experience so far and that shared perspectives on their digital transformation journey.

A promising result but there's still lots to do

This year the average score for digital maturity and effectiveness among the surveyed UK organisations was 51% – an increase of 4% from 2023.

This level (40-59%) is defined as ‘Digital Experimenter’, typically meaning that organisations are making great strides forward but missing investment, goal alignment and rapid advances to yield a strong performance digitally.

However, many organisations are still at the start of their journey, where the importance of implementing strong and relevant foundations is absolutely critical, which is the point where we are at Sport England's digital journey.

It’s incredible to think that four years ago we didn’t have a true sense of our digital maturity as a sector, whereas now we’re at a place where we can see clear trends and focus areas for our future efforts.

We’re investing in improved systems and processes to manage our data assets and scoping how best to design a data strategy that can support us into the future, alongside learning how to be more user-centered and service-driven in how we support our partners.  

And that's what is so important to remember with these results – there is no perfect score. We are all finding our way through and our end destinations will all be slightly different due to the different roles and customers or partners that we are supporting.

Navigating the digital challenges

The world of digital is also going to continue to evolve as new and emerging risks and technologies are developed, so we must stay focused on our lane.

The needs of our employees and our customers, partners and communities should always come first.

The better we can understand them and learn how to be the best buyer of digital services, the more we will then be able to adapt and flex as the world around us does too.

What is shining through clearly when speaking to organisations who’ve also have completed the consultation, is the importance of peer support and of being able to learn from each other as we go.

The Digital Futures cohort have shared that they would like even more support to learn from each other in the coming years, particularly from people like them or from organisations that are further ahead in the journey,

The goal? To be able to avoid some of the mistakes made by those that came before them or to test different approaches to similar problems in order to grow together.  

We welcome your feedback

Looking ahead to 2025, we would love to hear from even more organisations, particularly our own partners, including national governing bodies, Active Partnerships, charities and equality and diversity partners.

So if you are reading this and work for one of these organisations, I encourage you to speak to your colleagues and complete the Digital Futures survey when you can.

Or if you don’t quite feel ready to do that, please complete this feedback form, so that we can understand how best to support you over the coming years.

Here’s to a better digital future for the sport and physical activity sector in 2025. Let’s help each other to get there.

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