Client: Rugby Football Union
Project: Club management/development programme design and delivery
This process developing, piloting and evaluating the impact of its national club development process underpinned a major culture change in club development in (English) rugby. In addition to creating the process, we produced the accompanying resource materials and led the training programme for RFU professional staff to refine and facilitate it. The rationale was predicated upon changing the focus from simply driving a prescribed RFU club development ‘agenda’ to one based upon ‘whole clubs’ (i.e., all members not just ‘the committee’) identifying their own needs. A carefully orchestrated mechanism informed by a pre-distributed online survey of all club members, players, volunteers etc., was applied to ensure and facilitate constructive interaction. This engineered a change which has since been a key tenet of the RFU’s approach.