Jenny Seymour
Commercial Director
Give us a brief overview of the BPA as a company in general and your approach to sponsorship and partnerships specifically.
The BPA is the National Paralympic Committee (NPC) for Great Britain and Northern Ireland and it is our responsibility to select, prepare, enter, fund and manage the ParalympicsGB team at both Summer and Winter Games. We are a registered charity and our vision is to, through sport, inspire a better world for disabled people.
What approach differentiates the BPA and makes your sponsorship strategy unique?
Our charitable status as a rights holder makes us unique, combining elite level sport with a drive to inspire change. We achieve our social impact through our role as an influential, leading NPC, using the power of the Paralympics and our Paralympic athletes to change attitudes towards disability.
We use our brand to drive participation in sport and physical activity through two programmes – Parasport, powered by Toyota, and Get Set schools, which is a shared initiative with Team GB.
We are committed to building on the ever-growing profile of para sport to deliver real and sustainable change in the lives of disabled people. This is reflected in our new 10-year strategy that will be released later this year.
We will work closely with our partners and wider stakeholders to drive social change, focusing on a longer time span to enable us to demonstrate tangible impact.
How has your approach to sponsorship changed during Covid-19? Have you created any new initiatives or altered your operations to reach sponsors and audiences in new ways?
To say 2020 didn’t go according to plan is an understatement! The postponement of the Games meant we had to essentially rewrite the BPA masterplan and, within that, modify how we worked with our partners. This included extending and renewing contracts, delivering alternative rights, reworking activation plans and scoping out a whole new UK-based hospitality programme.
All our partners were incredible to work with and hugely supportive of our team and the safety and wellbeing of the athletes.
We were able to adapt quickly, and started delivering our rights virtually, through online webinars or virtual workouts. By switching to virtual rights delivery, we actually reached a greater cross-section of our partners’ colleagues. We delivered online sessions with athletes that had themes such as resilience, leadership and high performance and worked so well that we’ll keep this in for future cycles.
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver for partners?
Purposeful business is becoming increasingly important to brands, and we want to help deliver this by facilitating social impact through our partnerships.
We know diversity and inclusion is a mutual objective, with some of our partners already using our affiliation to push forward their D&I agenda. We want to formalise this opportunity for all partners so we have created a unique programme that will help us make progress together. This will be launched in the coming months.
Additionally, our main external brand campaign highlights our charitable vision first and foremost. In August 2019, on the original One Year to Go date, we launched our Impossible to Ignore campaign, which sought to showcase and celebrate the success of athletes on the field of play but also highlight the need for change for disabled people. We launched this through a digital and media campaign with many partners adopting and supporting this messaging. The launch highlighted:
- 49% of disabled people feel excluded from society
- 41% of the British public say they don’t know anyone disabled
- 43% of the British public think the number of disabled people is half of what it actually is
- ParalympicsGB has the platform to change this
- 84% of UK adults say the achievements of ParalympicsGB athletes have a positive impact on society overall
- 82% of disabled UK adults believe the Paralympic Games provides positive media coverage of disabled people.
The campaign is designed to harness the power of sport, and our incredible Paralympic athletes, to start a much greater conversation – turning the Tokyo Paralympic Games into a platform for real change. We want to break down barriers, shift perceptions and increase representation of disability across the UK.
How has the role of sponsorship changed for the BPA over the past few years? And what predictions can you make about how it’s going to change in the next five years?
Sponsorship has always been an integral part of the success of the BPA and we have seen a wider portfolio of funders keen to become partners, especially since London 2012 which was transformational for Paralympic sport. We’re delighted to see how partner activations have also grown, helping para athletes continuing to win the hearts of the British public.
Looking ahead, we want to strengthen our distinctive value proposition as a rights holder championing social purpose. We will look to our partners to support us on this journey and aim to strengthen our collaborate work in the diversity and inclusion space. We will also capitalise on the proximity of Paris in 2024 and shout about our pride in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire, as the birthplace of the Paralympic Games.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Make sure you tune in to Channel 4 and follow our social media channels come Games time (24 August – 5 September) and help our athletes become #ImpossibleToIgnore.
Like / follow the BPA on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter