Four campaigns that featured on Sport for Business during the year won major awards at the UK Sport Industry Awards that took place in London last night.

The International Paralympic Committee won the International Campaign of the Year with its #WeAre15 campaign. It launched in August of last year ahead of the Tokyo Paralympic Games and brought together the biggest coalition ever of international organisations from the worlds of sport, human rights, policy, business, arts, and entertainment.

The campaign will work with governments, businesses, and the public over the next decade to initiate change for people with a disability who make up 15 per cent of the global population.

Harnessing sport’s unique ability to engage massive global audiences and create positive change, the IPC, Special Olympics, Invictus Games Foundation and the International Committee of Sports for the Deaf (Deaflympics) have teamed up for the first time in history.

As part of the launch, major venues around the world were lit in purple to raise awareness.

They included the Mansion House, Wood Quay and City Hall in Dublin and the Titanic Building (above) and Belfast City Hall.

Other iconic locations included the Old Walls of Jerusalem, the Empire State Building, the Rainbow Bridge in Tokyo, the Coliseum in Rome, Edinburgh Castle and the Niagra Falls.

Here is a look at what the campaign aims to do.

The Barclays Women’s Super League were featured back in September and were winner last night in the Best Standalone Original Content category for the ‘It’s all kicking off project that lit up a season where Sky Sports and the BBC has brought the League to a greater number of viewers than ever before.

The third campaign to win that we featured was Brentford FC’s victory as the Sports Organisation of the Year.

Their rise to the Premier League and the style in which they did it was central to the interview we did at the start of the season with Michael Caulfield, a long time friend of ours.

The fourth was Guinness for the Never Settle campaign a partnership with Wikimedia to ensure that every member of the competing squads across Ireland and the UK in the Women’s Six Nations is properly recorded on the site viewed by 18 billion globally every month – adding over 135,000 words to their profiles.

Just 18 per cent of biographies on Wikipedia are of women, but this gap widens further in sport where just 3 per cent of 14,916 rugby-related biographies are of female players and the current Guinness Six Nations men’s squads have 392 per cent more words devoted to them than their female counterparts.

Other winners on the night included Toyota as Brand of the Year and Tom Daley who won the Outstanding Contribution Award.

 

Sport for Business Perspective

Don’t miss out on the Irish Sport Industry Awards which take place next week in Dublin and the judging panel for which was chaired by Sport for Business CEO Rob Hartnett

 

 

Sport for Business Partners