Sport England launches a digital loans & grants platform in 3 months

Sport plays a vital role in promoting the health and well-being of individuals and communities, which is why governments frequently implement various programs and initiatives to encourage physical activity within local communities, boroughs, and counties. These programs and initiatives can:

• Encourage community participation and engagement, strengthening relationships between residents and government
• Mitigate the impact sedentary lifestyles can have on healthcare costs
• Attract people and/or businesses to locate to a specific area, creating the foundation for a stronger local economy

One such example: Sport England. Founded in 1996, Sport England is an arm's-length body of government responsible for growing and developing grassroots sport and getting more people active across England. "Everyone has the right to take part in sport and physical activity. At Sport England, we provide support to a variety of organisations so more people can enjoy the physical and mental benefits of being physically active regardless of their background or personal circumstances," said Rob Hartley, Head of Loan Operations & Contracts at Sport England.

Through advocacy, investment in sport programmes and infrastructure, research, and partnership, Sport England works closely with national sport governing bodies, local authorities, and community organisations to support everything from school physical education programs to local cricket clubs and professional football teams.

These programmes took a hit when COVID-19 public health protocols wouldn’t allow for spectators, impacting revenue streams so significantly that organisations are still recovering years later.

So, Sport England launched the Government Sport Survival Package, which offered several loans and grants opportunities to help sport stay intact. “Sport England as an organisation is very experienced as a grant funder, but loan funding was a completely new world for us. So we had to both establish a process and execute loans at the same time,” said Howard Thompson, Loan Portfolio Lead at Sport England. “We had to adapt quickly as changes came at pace.”

Moving at the speed of now is something that many government organisations face. Yet, moving quickly cannot come at the expense of personalisation or transparency as there tends to be a heightened level of visibility regarding loans and grants funding, meaning teams have to be ready to answer data calls for government, press briefings, public inquiries, and more.

The result: organisations have to find a balance between speed, scale, agility, and visibility – which can be quite difficult for teams who suddenly find themselves managing a loan book for the next 25 years. That’s what makes Sport England such a significant example: the team found this balance and became a loans and grants best practice – and then shared the key takeaways that make a great starting point for your next digital transformation to-do list.

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"We didn't have time for blue-sky development. We very much needed something out-of-the-box with standardised processes and controls that we could onboard quickly. We needed something adaptable and extensible that we could plug our APIs into and get data out of easily. And in the long-term, it needed to be something that was portable," said James Vickery, Digital, Data and Technology Consultant at Sport England. “And we were very familiar with the basic functionality and the CRM functionality, so we started there.”

The Sport England team launched a loan book management platform on the Salesforce Customer 360 for Public Sector. This platform gives the team the tools they need to streamline oversight of the loan programme, maintain real-time visibility and an audit trail of borrower activity and payment schedules, and automate reporting – operationalising the loan book programme, end-to-end.

Here's how it works:

• Step 1: Service delivery | Once the loan request has been submitted, a borrower profile is created in Service Cloud. Here, loan portfolio managers can review the details, tag subject matter experts on specific questions, assign next steps, follow up with borrower organisations as required, and disburse the loan accordingly.
• Step 2: Relationship management | Sales Cloud brings the following: once the loan has been disbursed, the borrower's service history is automatically added to a personalised profile record in Sales Cloud, giving Sport England a 360-degree view of the customer. This helps the team to monitor the long-term lifecycle of the loan as well as providing transparency of individual events, like compliance activities and repayments. Borrowers will also be able to log into an online portal built on Experience Cloud at any time, where they can find a summary of their current loan status including amount, payment history, next repayment date, interest information, and more. They can also upload requested documents and confirm submission within the portal as needed.
• Step 3: Reporting and analytics | Integrated reports and dashboards provide the team with data-driven insight into the programme, helping them not only prioritise repayment performance and monitoring for potential issues, but also help ensure complete data is kept for all transactions, essential for government reporting requirements. "We have established escalation pathways and have an audit trail of all activity that we can show step by step. We can put forward an action to get external or internal advice and it's kept in the system once received," Hartley said.

Lightning Platform was included, giving Sport England a set of tools to facilitate efficient management of the loan book, adjusting workflows and building apps as needed, automating more processes involved in the loan origination and distribution journey. For example, if data privacy requirements change – a common occurrence as new programmes are introduced – the team can update access permissions accordingly. As a financial intermediary programme, they extended this through a custom app available on the Salesforce AppExchange giving the Sport England team the tools they need as a social investment lender to manage the specific lifecycle of the loan process including document and compliance monitoring, completing mandated The Know Your Customer* verifications, maintaining activity records, and tracking repayments.

The team can test new features and functionalities before pushing them live using Sandbox and educate internal users on how to manage loans using Trailhead.

“We launched a role-based training program, complete with modules on specific areas. This helped us onboard staff in a timely and efficient manner - especially important since, again, we had to move quickly,” said Thompson.

The platform went live in three months (ahead of schedule and at 20% under budget), and has already shown quantitative results:

• To date, the platform has been used to manage the disbursement of £204 million in loans
• 20% of team resources on mission critical work instead of administrative tasks
• 20+ key dashboards that Sport England is able to use for reporting
• 169 funded organisations directly managed
• 1,676 total sport organisations receiving funding through the programme

As well as more qualitative impacts:

• The platform offers a single, digital environment for all users, helping borrowers and Sport England staff understand the details of a loan in real time. "Being able to see bottlenecks helps us to focus our efforts and progress things as quickly as possible," said Hartley.
• The platform enables data-driven decision making. "We have metrics now. We can track everything in one place, and, critically, we've got certainty that we're not missing contacts. All those things have been a big step change for us," Vickery shared.
• The platform assists with compliance processes and audit trails. "We're managing this loan book on behalf of the government, and the platform allows us to have a clear audit trail of what is essentially a public investment," Thompson said.

In an environment where many departments, agencies, and ministries are being asked to do more with less, Sport England demonstrates that an investment in technology is an investment in this new mission. "Technology like this doesn't have to be expensive, and it doesn't have to take years to implement. We've shown that we can do it in a relatively short space of time for minimal cost to the public purse," said Thompson. "Professional sport organisations have strong links to the community. This strategy is helping us make sure that these organisations survived and, ultimately, those community links, too.”

*The Know Your Customer (KYC) process is a legal requirement to comply with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws in the U.K.