It was evidently a massive weekend in Irish sport with Rugby Golf, Football and Rowing all clamouring for attention but perhaps one of the events that will have the most lasting impact on those taking part ow watching happened away from the brightest spotlight in Energia Park in Donnybrook.
The Energia Rugby for All Blitz was one of the first major participation events in the brand’s five year commitment with Leinster Rugby to its Rugby for All initiative promoting Mixed Ability Rugby.
We caught up with Energia’s Lorna Danaher on the eve of the event to find out more about what it is based on and what the hopes are around delivering an exceptional programme.
SfB: It’s a busy week building up to the first major event of the Rugby for All initiative. Tell me a little about what this is all about.?
LD: Rugby for All is an initiative that we’ve established in partnership with Leinster Rugby. And the goal is that we’re going to grow the game of rugby in the province among people who have physical and learning differences.
We officially launched it with our brand ambassador, James Martin, who is of course an Oscar winner with Down Syndrome and an avid tag rugby player. Honestly, of all the stars that we’ve worked with across the sporting spheres. He’s definitely the hardest one to pin down but he’s an absolute superstar.
The motivation behind expanding the rugby family and making it open to everybody who wants to play regardless as to whatever has happened in life and certainly way beyond what would be normally associated with either the uber fan or the elite player is a great one. Where did the original thinking to actually go there come because it’s not an easy journey to reach into places where others gone?
At Energia group, one of our core pillars is community focus and we’ve a new initiative internally, the allyship program.
An important part of this is supporting people with physical and learning differences within the community.
Simultaneous to adopting this internally, we asked Leo Cullen to do one of our internal events on dynamism and as part of the conversation asked if we would meet with his wife Darina for a coffee?
She is the founder of Neurodiversity Ireland, which was initially very much focused in Sandymount, but now it’s gone to a national scale.
She was just telling me about this initiative and about the importance of access to local community activities. and how difficult it is for neurodivergent people to engage in sports.
It kind of sat with me and, and we sponsored an award that they had at their award night last year. The seed had been planted and then we were contacted by David Hicks from Palmerstown RFC, and he’s the manager of their inclusion tag rugby team, the Eagles, and he just asked us to go down to a blitz he was organising.
So myself and Amy O’Shaughnessy, and Ross from Legacy Communications went just to see what it was about.
And we literally arrived down at the sidelines and David was over and he was putting tags on us. “You are getting stuck into the game,” he said and we were kind of going, oh God, at least I wore my runners.
It was honestly two of the best hours I’ve ever spent. It was just a fabulous day and all the volunteers, all the players, everyone was having an amazing time and getting involved and you can really see it as an outlet for the players and the parents.
So off the back of this, we did a research piece through behaviors and attitudes, with the players themselves and the parents of players and asked them, what is it about rugby that you are getting benefit from?
We drew a lot of findings off the back of that, which was really interesting. Like the one takeaway from the players was they want to play more and they want to have more people to play against. And for the parents, it was, they wanted the same thing, but they wanted this area of rugby amplified more because they kind of came across it by chance or they started the team themselves in their local rugby club.
We then uncovered through the census that 13% of people in Ireland have physical or learning difference.
So from that initial spark and the early research where did you go to then?
The we really started doing the research. After the players and the parents we surveyed Leinster fans and our own Energia customers. We wanted to benchmark, and we looked deeper with Legacy into CSR initiatives.
We didn’t want this to be tokenistic and we didn’t want it to be just a badging exercise.
We wanted to do something that was meaningful to this community, and we wanted to have really tangible goals.
We’re partnered with Leinster for another five years, and so we have scope to really build something special within that time.
What were the next steps towards doing that?
One thing that we did before we’d actually launched it officially was the sensory toolkits. We want to make clubhouses more accessible for people, not just to our players, but for people who want to go and get involved in these communities. So we, we developed sensory toolkits and we gave them to 30 clubs around Leinster.
The fact that not only is the partnership with Leinster five years, but this program is five years as well, you know that you’re going to be doing things differently in year five to what you’re doing in year one, because you will have learned how to make them better. You mentioned there about the, about the KPIs and the lofty ambitions. What are some of those?
To be fair, Leinster are actually very engaged in the space. They have 26 rugby clubs currently engaged and about 500 people and what we want to do is double the participation, so from 500 to 1000 and grow it from 26 clubs to 40 clubs.
The decision was made there that we want to make sure that those clubs and those teams are actually full. That it’s not just, oh, we’ll set up a team, but there’s only two people on it. So actually they don’t get to train, they don’t get to play.
So it’s actually making sure that the clubs that have the teams are really well supported and developed fully.
We also really want to grow the awareness in the space and develop media coverage around it.
I think a lot of people would have seen last year, there was the Mixed Ability Blitz down in Cork and there was a lot of really fantastic footage and stories coming out of that.
We want to build on that and the good news stories. And, and to be honest, like every single person that we’ve reached out to and had conversations with about this and different organizations. Like everyone’s been so positive and just wanted to be getting involved. , so that’s a, that’s a massive thing is, is to just grow the awareness that this is an area that people can get involved in.
How did the Weekend Blitz come about?
Everyone that we’ve spoken to in clubs and told about this wants to be involved.
We had been in contact with Old Wesley and Bective about getting involved, and they literally thrown the doors open, whatever we wanted, whatever we needed from them.
Old Wesley actually have a team of people who are visually impaired and there are so many different types of teams that we want to include.
You mentioned awareness. How do you go about measuring success in this space? Is there a social media metric that you and Energia go to in order to actually determine, yeah, we’ve had an impact there? What sort of data are you looking to and what kind of analysis do you apply to the decision making?
There are a lot of different metrics and benchmarks that we want to grow. Obviously, you know, brands don’t do things for the good of their health, there, there are business goals as well but the most important thing is the highlight on our community focus pillar.
We do have to benchmark where we are now and hopefully really see substantial results in one, two, three, four, and five years time.
Your partnership with the Energia AIL League and your relationship with the IRFU, as well as Leinster means you are heavily invested in and across the sport of rugby. Are there areas in which you will be able to leverage that and give more to the Rugby for All initiative than might otherwise have been the case if you were just coming in as a program sponsor?
Definitely. Our existing relationships are a massive part of that. The relationships we have with the IRFU as commercial partners mean that we’ve been able to communicate directly with clubs around the initiative for our launch video, for example, and we were able to reach out to contacts who were doing a training session for people with learning and physical differences, and we were able to go down and capture content for the video to really show the impact.
The amount of times I’ve spent talking to Darina Cullen and asking her questions. She has been a huge part of getting this right. We don’t know everything and we are new to this space, but we are learning very quickly.
Leinster have given fantastic support and they really are going all out. They are really enthusiastic about this initiative and that helps. We’re also able to lean on the IRFU. They have a lot of learnings in this space from the other provinces that they’re able to share with us and are happy to do so.
We also have partnerships with Rugby Players Ireland. So we’re leaning on them to make sure that we have really good talent coming down to the Blitz on the day.
We’re partnered with Waterford Chamber as well, and they’re launching a really big initiative about making Waterford a neurodivergent friendly city,
So yes, lots of willing leverage with our partners, and they’re more than happy to jump on board and back us in such a substantial way.
They understand that we actually are doing this in a very sensitive meaningful and impactful strategic way.
Getting involved in initiatives like this can be one of those moments that changes the way that you live your life and think about life in general.
Saturday’s blitz proved this and it is really only the beginning.
