BUCS Active links to three important interventions:
- Tackling inactivity in female students
- Using physical activity to tackle mental health issues
- Increasing the number of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds engaging in sport and physical activity.
BUCS Active funded by Sport England, supports institutions to deliver a variety of physical activity programmes by funding access to digital technologies and opportunities to develop the student and staff workforce to help the sustained delivery of the projects.
Further information, as to why the three targeted interventions were selected can be found here:
1. Sport England Uniting the Movement Strategy
BUCS Active will offer an opportunity for your institution to enhance current programmes and help meet the ever-changing demands of the current climate. All whilst helping to widen accessibility and aligning delivery to the targeted interventions of tackling female inactivity, supporting student mental health and wellbeing, and increasing representation from low socio-economic backgrounds.
Our primary focus is supporting members with helping students to continue to lead active lifestyles; both on campus and via distanced learning. Institutions can opt to engage with the project to support planned delivery or you can use it as an opportunity to start offering something new. In particular, the functionality to offer virtual activity may support institutions with an opportunity to create new programmes of activity in addition to planned in-person delivery.
The digital technologies can be used to track and monitor all student engagement across your recreational sport programmes; both in-person and virtually. The digital technologies will also offer the opportunity for students to link their BUCS Active account with wearable fitness devices (Fitbit, Apple Health, Strava, Nike and Garmin) meaning that activities and challenges can be geared towards general physical activity. This will provide you with the ability to set physical activity challenges, such as weekly step challenges and give you an insight into activity levels across your student body. All activity can be captured and fed into a personalised institutional portal (powered by Playwaze) where there will be functionality to generate reports to help with the analysis of data.
BUCS Active workforce development opportunities have been supported by National Governing Bodies, Street Games, UK Coaching and Student Minds to enable students and staff to develop their skills to support the delivery and sustainability of BUCS Active projects.
Prior to submitting the Expression of Interest form, please make sure you are aware of the requirements to be part of BUCS Active:
- As BUCS Active is funded by Sport England, it is only available to English institutions.
- BUCS will provide all projects with access to use online digital platforms. Successful projects must use these platforms to record participant numbers for the duration of the project.
- The activity targeting the specific intervention(s) outlined within each project should be new but can already have been planned for next academic year. If your institution has previously been funded through BUCS Active, the delivery would be required to tackle a different intervention.
- The project activity should be delivered for at least four months between October 2022 - June 2023. All projects will be required to submit reports on the impact of delivery.
- The lead member of staff responsible for the delivery of the project will be required to attend regular project meetings during the delivery period.
- Throughout BUCS Active, BUCS will provide all successful institutions with ongoing support and workforce development opportunities. Successful projects will have opportunity to support BUCS in developing future digital technologies.
1. Online activity timetables & class bookings - Institutions can fully digitalise their booking systems. Features include:
- Upload of unlimited activities, process bookings, manage capacity, track attendance
- Booking and payment functionality to take registrations for your activities and classes, as well as online and in-app payments
- Track and monitor participation at each session
- Ability to host live stream or on-demand activity content
- Reward your participants and members with points for engaging in your activities. They can convert points into your own prizes
- Standard reports are provided for bookings and attendance, with the option to customise your own reports.
2. Intramural Delivery Platform – The online delivery platform will integrate your current intramural activity. Features include:
- Intramural - Leagues
Unlimited singles, doubles, or team round robin leagues with online entries and live results
- Intramural - Tournaments
Unlimited singles, doubles, or team knockout tournaments with online entries and live results
- Intramural - Ladders
Unlimited singles or doubles ladders with custom challenges spans, and online entries
- Reporting
A set of reports, which will allow for tracking and monitoring usage.
3. Institution / Campus Challenges – This function allows institutions to create challenges for both students and staff to engage in physical activity and exercise. Features include:
- Virtual challenges
- Weekly/monthly activity-based challenges
- Step, floors climbed, distance travelled etc
- In Person Challenges
- Campus Challenges
- Day and location-based challenges
- Team Tracker Challenges
- Weekly/monthly activity-based challenges, where you partake within a team
- Step, floors climbed, distance travelled etc
- Rewards
- Unlimited rewards to gamify activity, letting your participants redeem the points they earn
- Set targets for challenges where students can unlock prizes and institution focused rewards for being active
- Wearable fitness trackers integrated this allows tracking and monitoring of fitness activities which is linked to rewards
- Personal Best Challenges - Create and share sport and activity challenges and engage participants in challenge leader boards
- Not Just Competitive - Deliver something for everyone using competitive and non-competitive challenges with evidence upload, results entry, and reward points
- Personal Best Challenges - Create and share sport and activity challenges and engage participants in challenge leader boards
- Not Just Competitive - Deliver something for everyone using competitive and non-competitive challenges with evidence upload, results entry, and reward points
