Sport England launches a digital loans & grants platform in 3 months
Learn how to use data & CRM to distribute loan funding with speed, transparency, & personalisation.
6 min read
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:
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.”
Technology like this doesn't have to be expensive, and it doesn't have to take years to implement. This strategy is helping us make sure that these organisations survive and, ultimately, those community links, too.
Howard ThompsonLoan Portfolio Lead, Sport England
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.
"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:
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:
As well as more qualitative impacts:
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.
