THE TRANSCRIPT BELOW WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT.  BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, WE CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

TX:  17.6.17 – Ep 18. Sharon Fuller – BBC Sport editor BBC Sport editor on behavioural and cultural change.

HOST:  TAMMY PARLOUR

T: Welcome to A Question of Performance. I’m Tammy Parlour and in this series I’ll be talking with leading figures from sport and business about what improves, limits and drives performance. Join me for 20 minutes of discussion twice a month to hear a range of views on what it means to be successful, how to cope with failure and what people have learnt along the way.

[Music]

How do you inspire a Nation?  Today I’m chatting to Sharon Fuller, the editor of BBC Sports New Live Events Service.  Sharon also has overall responsibility for Get Inspired.  A BBC sports participation project which inspires the Nation to get active.  She talks about behavioural change campaigns.  How audiences are consuming sport across broadcast, digital and interactive content and how she goes about measuring success. 

We recorded this in the BBC canteen so I apologise for the background noise.

Thank you Sharon.  Thank you so much for meeting with me.  I was going to say this morning it’s actually this afternoon isn’t it?

SF:    It is now yes.

TP:    You’re passionate about sport and you’re also passionate about media

SF:    Yeah.

TP:    Which passion came before the other?

SF:    Well I think when I was in my teenage years I always had ambitions of being someone famous and I never really quite had a talent for anything and I was never going to be in front of the camera, which I realised very quickly, because I would just get far too nervous.  So I went down the route of making the tea in a local radio station because you don’t have to have your face on camera.  The area that I had my first experience in was sport and the reason that they brought me into sport as a 14 year old girl who was interested in getting into the media, was because they didn’t have any women and that was my first step into the media.

TP:    Did sport occur to you before?

SF:    I was a fan of Formula 1.  I was quite a big fan of Norwich City, we won’t go into that now and I guess I was kind of a daddy’s girl, but I wasn’t necessarily into, I didn’t have a big knowledge about sport and what was really interesting for me was after that I then worked in lots of different areas of media and broadcasting and I just thought that the people that worked in sport were so much more straightforward, sensible, no crazy creative types like you had in drama, it just felt like a place where I fitted in a way that I didn’t feel I fitted in hardcore news.  I didn’t feel like I fitted in arts or anything like that it just felt like a natural home for me.

TP:    Do you still feel that?

SF:    I do yeah and I think as I’ve got more senior and gone through my career it’s probably been more of a challenge.  You don’t really notice when you’re in your younger years the difference between how many women are treated in the sports work place and as you get more senior particularly it becomes more apparent.  Most of those experiences outside of the BBC have been a lot more obvious where those differences are than where I work now where it’s absolutely a different world compared to what I’ve been used to.

Nearly everywhere I’ve worked in sport through my life I’ve been the only woman in whatever.  The only woman in the department.  The only woman doing that particular job.  The only woman on production and you don’t notice that you stick out when you’re younger and then when you get further up the chain you kind of do, but inside the BBC there are so many more women and it’s totally changed my outlook on working in sport because I’ve just haven’t worked with so many women before and I’d always felt like I had to be one of the lads and now I can just be me a little bit more

So I guess it whilst my passion for sport became a little bit alongside the media part.  I thought as a cheeky teenager I wanted to be famous and actually it turned out that I was too nervous and too self-conscious to ever be famous about anything, but actually I really, really cared about the media and I really cared about sport.  As I have kind of grown and changed and gone through my career you start to see, you meet so many passionate people who really care about what you do even though they don’t necessarily know your role in it.  So when you work in sport it’s something that people feel really passionate about and it’s and I find that it’s something that you feed off, like people really care about the output or the events and the things that you work on and you start to be able to use that to make a difference in certain areas.  You can actually pick places where you can start to make an impact because of what you do as a job and I think that that’s really important.  That’s one of the things that really motivates me about what I do is actually helping things move on a bit even if it’s a small level or a big level and actually being able to keep things moving on that make changes and develop things rather than just going in and doing a job and going home.  I don’t think I could do a job that I didn’t actually have to do something pro-actively to make it better somehow.

TP:    Looking back on the roles that you’ve had, they seem to me anyway, that they’ve been very much around mass participation.

SF:    Yeah.

TP:    Was that intentional or has that happened to you?

SF:    When I first was offered the role looking after Get Inspired which is the participation campaign I looked after for the BBC, I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to do with it.  It was born out of London 2012, it was a project that had already been going for a few months.  It had an established team, but I don’t think it knew what it wanted to be and I think for me the thing that really appealed to me was being able to turn it into something which was then able to make an impact because we changed the project and then it had a meaning and a purpose and actually what interests me is behavioural and cultural change and not specifically just participation.  It’s actually about how you can influence and change the culture in an organisation or how you can influence and change the wider cultural community if there’s an issue that you see is something that means something to you.

So whilst participation is kind of a [unclear 6:00.8] it’s actually that kind of wider stuff.  It’s really about communities and people and caring about people at the end of the day.

TP:    Talk about behaviour change.  That’s incredibly on a National Scale, that’s an incredibly difficult challenge.  How do you approach that?

SF:    You have to be targeted and understanding knowing from the outset that you are not going to be able to change everything at once and also you have to have a really good understanding of people because you can’t treat people as a mass.  Everyone is an individual.  They have their own feelings, emotions, motivations, external factors like life, family, work, all of those things so the best way that I found to approach those things is to find some key target groups and actually look for people who’ve already done the behaviour change peaks that you’re trying to do and use them as advocates.  So your advocates in behaviour change are one of the most valuable things and that is someone who has already been through that journey that you’re trying to encourage others to do.

So rather than me standing on a pedestal telling people stuff other people can influence other people like them and they’re the people who know and understand other people like them so rather than us taking a big wide position and trying to be [unclear 7:21.4] about it you take people who represent it and you give them a platform to tell their stories.

You also don’t have to link it to all of the practical information that you need so there’s an expectation about what the thing is that you’re trying to do and what they might expect when they turn up and all of the other barriers which might be time, money, all of those things, but ultimately people influence people and unless you feel like the thing that you’re trying to be persuaded to do is people like you, you’re not even going to look at it.  So you have to really break it down and choose really key target audience areas and also do a whole load of research because the one thing that I’ve learned in my career is you’re never the only person trying to solve a problem, there’s always somebody else who wants to solve the same thing and working together and working collaboratively and in partnership with people you have much more chance of success than doing something by yourself.

TP:    Is it challenging creating those partnerships?

SF:    Partnerships are always challenging because you’ll always have some common ground, but it’s never going to be 100% and what’s really important is to know from the outset what the common ground is and whether you can deal with the other stuff and if you can’t deal with the other stuff, then there’s no point taking it forward, but if you have enough common ground and you can work with the other bits of it then you have a useful partnership and within partnerships there’s always different objectives, there’s different resources as well so often one of the biggest complications when it comes to partnerships, is balancing out resources and the use of every one and making it fair and it’s always really important to agree from the outset who’s doing which part of what and how you can imagine success and how at the end of it, you’re going to decide when the end is and what your exit plan is.  If you don’t have an exit plan from a partnership it can be really, really awkward.  It’s like one of those things where you’re trying to get someone to break up with you.  You don’t want to get into that situation you always have to have an exit plan.

TP:    Very good advice.  I was talking to Guardian journalist, Anna Kessel, the other week and she talked about the way that people, the changing way that the media is being consumed from a print perspective.  You work across broadcast, digital, interactive content how’s that changing?

SF:    You have to look after both parts of your audience.  So if you want to, and it’s a different style of communication, so if you’ve got a programme that’s on BBC 1 you’re talking very generally to a general audience who isn’t necessarily an expert in the subject, but might care about it or buy into it.  If you’re on a digital platform you can be much more macro about it and much more targeted about who you’re talking to and who you’re trying to talk to so a very basic level, it’s talking to a lot of people versus talking to a few people, but actually they can be equally impactful and the best thing to do is try and make them work together and when you’re looking at additional video content needs that is we know that the majority of people are watching video on their mobile phones with no sound on so naturally you have to think about putting sub-titles on something where in the past it wouldn’t necessarily have been your first choice of things to do.

The way that you create video content is much more personal, much more full framed, much more face in the picture and the sub-titles in a way that if you’re creating the same video and telling the same story for television you would shoot it completely differently because you’re shooting it for an entirely different experience and the other thing that’s really interesting about it is the engagement time with the content so people will still sit and watch a half hour programme on television, but actually when you’re looking at how long people consume content for on social media it’s a matter of seconds so you have to hook somebody into a piece of content really quickly on social media whereas with television it’s more of an appointment to view you’ve bought into it in a different way and one of the products that I’m working on at the moment which is a live streaming project we’re seeing that where we’re taking events and putting them as a live stream on our website we get a longer engagement time than we do on social media.  We think that is because people are more bought  into the brand they’re more bought into the event itself it has a certain level of credibility and it’s not kind of thrown away for free in the way that it can be on social media.  So the other part of live streaming is thinking about the analytics so when you’re looking at live streaming of a sport event on Facebook you might, the number might we quite big not just Facebook, Twitter, YouTube all of those things.  The number might be quite big in terms of views, but you have to be really careful about what counts as a view on different platforms and some platforms a view is something that you scroll passed sometimes it’s three seconds.  You really need to dig down into that level of detail when you’re looking at live streaming.  Another tell tale sign is did people have the sound on because if you’re live broadcasting a sports event sometimes it works without the sound on and sometimes it doesn’t so it’s all within the context of what that event is and I sourced that recently through some live sport that had been streamed on a social media platform and the average watch time was three seconds and a project that I’ve been working on the average watch time is 15 to 20 minutes and it’s because things like social platforms are designed to be consumed on a mobile device whilst the web site that I work on is also designed to work on a mobile device it also works on a sports app and it also works on an IPTV, you can access it on a big screen experience as well and what’s really interesting is that for a long form live sport event people are still navigating to the largest possible screen to watch it, even though the actual route into it might have been through a mobile device.

TP:    It’s interesting you start talking about impact.  I’m interested to know what is success?  What is positive impact for you in this area?  Is it about those 15 minute views?  Is it about actually changing participation in society?  How do you know you’re doing a good job?

SF:    Well there’s lot of different measures and there’s always objectives at the start of a project so when we’re looking at live streaming our objectives are actually around the amount of time that people spend with the content because that means they’re engaged with it.  That’s a value that they’re placing on that content by investing their time in it.  So time spent is absolutely really, really important to us and then when it comes to other measures for the live streaming project we’re also trying to create a lower cost point of entry to BBC platforms for minority sports. So that means a sport or an event that might already have a live stream we want to try and help them reach more people.  So that’s one of our objectives is to actually not look at an overall number of views in the same way that we might have done in a telly world, but actually to look at whether we’re helping a sport reach more people by letting them use our platform.

Another objective for that project is actually about better representation of the whole of the UK and so in some cases that might mean showing women’s sport, but in other cases it might mean showing an Indian cricket event that we wouldn’t otherwise broadcast because actually it’s reaching an audience that we haven’t reached in another way and actually doing full analysis of what that audience looks like across the board and who it is that we’re not reaching.  It’s actually the reason why we did our big live streaming project with the rugby league so we live streamed the early stages of the challenge cup and part of that was because we realised that we under indexed in Northern audiences which for me is mad considering we’re based in Manchester.  So we looked at what was the sport that would most appeal to Northern audiences if we did something extra with it and that’s how come we came up with live streaming early stages of the challenge cup.

On the participation side it’s really difficult for us to measure.  What we choose to measure is how many people we refer to external web sites.  So we see the BBC’s role in Get Inspired in that to be to raise awareness of the opportunities to participate and create content that helps with behaviour change to get people to the point where they will click on an external link which is the place where they will actually be in the world of taking part.  So we measure the people that we refer to those external places.  We also ask for feedback digitally from those web sites to make sure that our numbers match up and one of the other things that we measure is the awareness of Get Inspired as a campaign.  So there’s regular surveys that we do for that.

The most important thing for us is to be a platform to help promote opportunities to participate and to do the content that helps people break down the barriers to get there.

TP:    Is there anything, any content that when it comes up you sort of know oh well this is going to go.

SF:    It’s always something quirky or something really, really brilliant.  So in some cases that might be the most amazing dunk you’ve seen in an MBA match.  On the other hand it might be a snowboarding granny and the thing is if you know you’ve got a good snowboarding granny and she’s going to talk to the camera about how much she loves snowboarding, even if you’ve got nothing else and you’ve got five seconds of a granny saying how much she loves snowboarding you know that it’s going to be brilliant.

TP:    There’s a lot of talk in the areas that I operate in about the value of elite role models, elite athlete role models.  In what you do, do you see a value?

SF:    I do and I think that it’s different things to different people and I think you always need to see people that you relate to in the media and I think that’s really important and not everyone relates to the same people.  Some people it might be a teacher.  Some people it might be a sportsman.  Some people it might be a celebrity of another kind.  Another time it might be your aunty.  It’s really personal.  So I think it’s really important to have high visibility for a range of different people in the media.  If everyone looks the same then you’re only ever going to appeal to certain people.  You have to have a broad range of role models and it’s also about normalisation of seeing different people doing different things that they might not do otherwise or changing perceptions.  It’s really important for that kind of general perception changing, but when it comes down to individuals it’s really personal and what some people might find really inspiring might completely turn off somebody else and I think it also depends on what the objective of it is.  If the objective of it is participation then it’s useful to see people  like you in the media, but probably at the participation in things unless you are already sporty elite role models might not be your number one thing, but it’s important that they’re there, but if you’re trying to inspire more people to go through a performance pathway seeing what people like you from your kind of background in that role already, will inspire you to go through that.

So I think it’s a loaded question in a number of ways.  I think it’s really important from a media perspective especially to make sure that we see a wide range of people from different backgrounds every single day in everything that we do.

TP:    When you talk Sharon you’re incredibly passionate about what you do it just sort of comes off you in waves.  There must be times that you feel stressed and feel like you’re banging your

SF:    Main stresses in my job are the number of different things that I’m balancing because I care about so many things and actually prioritising my time because I’m not going to be effective if I spread my time over a lot of different things and sometimes I have to take a step back from a project that I really don’t want to because I have to at that time prioritise something else and it’s those things where I’ve invested in projects that I care about and might have to let something go or hand over to someone else.  That I find really stressful and really difficult.

Also I’m not very good at delegating so that doesn’t really help either.

TP:    Why?

SF:    Why?  It’s half way between it takes too long to explain something that you really care about to somebody else and kind of also not really wanting to hand things over.  I’m sure that the people I work with will happily give you lots of examples where that’s happened, but I think my problem is taking on too many things that I really care about and I also really hate being late.  I find being late really stressful and inevitably because I’ve taken on so many projects I’m always late at things so apologies to anyone who knows me obviously.

TP:    Can I just say that Sharon was early to this meeting.  What’s filling your head at the moment?

SF:    Oh goodness!  It’s everything from I’m on a run of having done 10,000 steps a day on my fitness and I missed a day at day 59 of all my days in a row which means I didn’t make it to 60 and that is bugging me at the moment.  That’s in the back of my mind.  Yesterday I didn’t do my 10,000 steps and I really feel like I’ve let myself down.

TP:    Do extra today.

SF:    I will do extra today, but it doesn’t matter I’ve broken the run now of nearly two months which is really awful, but other things that are in my mind at the moment are there’s some quite big partnerships that I’m working on which aren’t straightforward and trying to resolve them in the best way for everybody so everyone gets what they need out of it and some of it will be high profile stuff that people will know about probably in a year’s time, but actually we’re at that point where we’re trying to work out who’s delivering which part of it and he’s put so much money into it and whether it’s going to be effective, how long it’s going to last and where everyone’s brand is going to go.

TP:    It’s big negotiation time.

SF:    Yes.

TP:    Anything that you’d wish I’d ask you?

SF:    I don’t like to talk about my own exercise and I think what’s really interesting about this is because I have worked on participation projects and because I have worked in sport the first thing that everyone tends to ask you when they meet you is what your sport is and I would just like to tell everybody I haven’t got one now.  I have been running in the past.  I have been fighting in the past and at the moment I am enjoying going out for a walk in the mornings just listening to an audio book and that happens to be my thing at the moment and I think that because I have been so involved in it and so many people have done so many different sports and activities around me, it’s really infectious the getting involved part, but you have to find your own time to do what fits for you and so whilst I, in the past have been involved in cycling and have volunteered with the women’s team, the most important thing is to find the thing that fits for you wherever you are in your life, but to stick with the thing and always do something and never do nothing.

TP:    This podcast is about performance and people’s different ideas about what success is, what success means to them.  What’s performance, what’s success to you?

SF:    That’s a really tough question because with lots of different projects there’s lot of different measures of success, but for me personally…

TP:    Yes for you personally.

SF:    It’s really about feeling like I’m moving things on in some way and that might be for me personally and it might be in my career, but I can’t do with standing still and things not changing and developing and I think if I felt that I wasn’t making an improvement in some way and whether I might mean my home life balance because it’s something that I am consciously trying to make more of an improvement on at the moment and I’ve recently got married, so it’s a particularly tough call right now, but also in my career.  If I felt I was doing the same thing at the same level for more than two years I think I would also go a bit mad so.

TP:    Just some quick fire questions for you now then.  What did you eat for breakfast?

SF:    I had one of those yoghurt and granola things from prep on the train.

TP:    Favourite piece of kit?

SF:    Favourite piece of kit?  I love my Mac book.

TP:    Your Mac book okay.  Sporting hero?

SF:    Sporting hero – for a very strange reason I’m going to say Martin Brundle.

TP:    And what’s the reason?

SF:    He’s from Norfolk and so am I and there are very few role models in sport from Norfolk.

TP:    Most useless piece of advice you’ve been given or given to somebody else?

SF:    [laughing]

TP:    That’s a mischievous sort of giggle.

SF:    Can we come back to that one in a minute?

TP:    Greatest passion outside of sport?

SF:    My other half.

TP:    Best performance enhancer?

SF:    Coffee.

TP:    And back to the most useless piece of advice?

SF:    Most useless piece of advice don’t speak until you’re spoken to.

TP:    And why’s that useless?

SF:    Because you never get anywhere if you’re trying to negotiate a partnership if you let everyone else talk and don’t say anything.

TP:    Brilliant.  Thank you so much for talking to me.

SF:    Thank you.

TP:    Thanks for listening you can follow the conversation on Twitter, Facebook and also don’t forget to subscribe on line to aquestionofperformance.com.

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