The campaign invites the public to cast their vote via www.joinourteam.com for the initiative they feel best deserves their financial support. The schemes range from the Tuesday Club in North Tyneside, which allows young people with disabilities to have fun participating in their favourite sport, to Fit n Funky in the West Midlands, which provides after-school activities such as karate, street dance and yoga for primary age children. Details of all 200 initiatives can be viewed on the website.
A pool of £3 million has been made available over the next six years by Norwich Union, with each of the initiatives in with a chance of winning a bronze award of £1,000. The 12 initiatives that receive the most votes will be given silver awards of £12,500 and will be put forward to compete for a single gold award of £50,000.
Media partnerships have been developed with The Times and Runner’s World and each of the 200 initiatives will be encouraged to promote themselves with pre-prepared press releases and posters to help them raise the support they need to reach one of the 12 silver award places.
Says Shaun Meadows, Marketing Director of Norwich Union Insurance: “Since 1999 our sponsorship of UK Athletics has worked very well for us as a property that we can really own, but for the next phase of our sponsorship we wanted to ensure we had a campaign that widened the appeal of our sponsorship and truly engaged our broad audiences.
“This new campaign is an excellent way of giving people the power to have an impact in sport in their local community and really help them to engage with our vision of inspiring the nation to support athletics at every level, and in particular, to help make it easier for 10 million children to get active by 2012.”
