As the Active Energy and Active Fun memberships expand to include even more fantastic activities, Nicki catches up with the team members who brought forth the ideas and the marketing manager who chose to listen.

When you’re a company as big as Live Active Leisure and spread over as many square miles, keeping things fresh, innovative and relevant to all of your team, members and users can come with its challenges.  Finding the magic idea that will have everyone cheering is no mean feat!

One of the things that is actively encouraged is ideas from the team – it’s all very well having a great management team in Head Office (and they are great!) but it is the people on the ground, working at the coal face of sports and fitness who chat to customers and pick up the adhoc feedback that makes the real differences.

As you might have guessed, this week, we have a great example of this team work and innovation in action! You will know that LAL are passionate about kids’ sports and fitness, relentless in their mantra of “start ‘em young!”.  Their Active Fun and Active Energy memberships have been developed to help parents plan, budget and encourage their wee ones to fall in love with living active from a young age.

Add to this the fact that many, many of our team are parents themselves and you will appreciate that we understand intrinsically the needs for value for money.  Love them as we do, children are a sure fire way to drain a bank account down to zero!  At the moment the Active Fun memberships include single session camps during school holidays (amazing value in itself for working parents), sportshall and swimming.  For older kids we throw in Teen Classes and Pool Discos which are always a big hit for hanging out with their mates.

Enter Debbie Scott, the general manager at Perth Leisure Pool and Dewars Centre.  Debbie and her team inherited the Ice Skating along with all other Dewars activities when LAL took over the centre four years ago.  As you will know, curling has always been extremely strong in Perth but skating had more of a haphazard approach.  However, over the four years since then the Dewars Team has worked hard to build up a regular ice skating offer and over this past season there has been a fantastic response to their efforts.  It seemed like a perfect opportunity to add some extra cool ice-tastic value to the kids’ memberships.

Debbie had this to say:

“We’re all passionate about the ice now and having built up this great programme of skating we grabbed the opportunity to give something back to our members.  The ice season runs from September to mid-April now so as well as weekends we capture both Christmas and Easter holidays.   This, coupled with the fact that we also run sessions during the summer holidays, has made ice skating a really popular choice for parents and kids and it seemed like a sensible idea to add it into the Active Fun and Active Energy memberships.”

Debbie took the idea to Karen Taylor who is head of marketing and business development and it just so happened that Karen was mulling over another similar proposition from Eileen Laycock at Strathearn Community Campus!

Eileen had noticed that during the holidays and at various other times of the year the outdoor Multi Use Games Areas (or MUGA as it’s called!) were a bit redundant – no-one was booking them and they lay unused and empty.  It occurred to her that groups of kids would love to book them out for five aside games, tennis and hockey. She flagged up the idea that they could be included in the membership packages and paid for in exactly the same way as the sportshall was.  Top idea!

Eileen had this to say:

“It was always such a pity to see the MUGA lying empty especially as there were kids around who we knew would love to make good use of it.  We already had sportshall included in the membership deals so it seemed like an obvious next step for us bring MUGA into play.”

With both options in front of her, Karen excitedly packaged up the new Active Fun / Active Energy memberships and brought two great ideas to fruition in one massively beneficial customer improvement. Innovation and team work at its very best!

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The Multi Use Games Areas are available throughout various LAL venues.  Please ask at your local LAL reception for further details.

Ice Skating at Dewars has a full programme over Easter Weekend and the Easter Holidays and this will be extended once again over the summer months.

Active Fun Memberships can be found here>>

Active Energy Memberships can be found here>>