More Than a Destination: What Sport Communicators Can Learn from Visit Flanders’ VisionA New Way of Seeing Sport and Storytelling

Just like Belgium isn’t seen as “a vacation spot” it isn’t seen as a figure skating or ballet country and that with so much potential. During our talk from visit flanders I got inspired by their strategies and how we may translate this into sports.

I would love to take you through my thoughts around visit Flanders’ strategy and what we could do with it in Figure Skating or Ballet.

Passionate Communities: The Power of Shared Identity

One of the things Visit Flanders tries to tap into in passions and one of this passions is cycling. And what is cycling? A SPORT! So if a tourism can gain from the passion of sports how is it not working for the sport organisations themselves?

Visit Flanders doesn’t just say “Hey, we do cycling here!” they created a whole phenomenon behind it. From a unique persona many fans can relate to, to creating a challenge for the wannabe cyclists.

How can we do this in sports like figure skating and dance? For cycling they talk about MAMIL; middle-aged man in lycra. In ballet they often talk about bunheads; the very stricked girls who always wear a perfect bun. We can link this to the fashion in cities like Antwerp and create a connection between bunheads and fashion. For figure skating there is no typical image so we’ll have to ask around what people think of when you say figure skating or what they think about the athletes. You may already leave your thoughts under these post; what is typically figure skating?

As soon as we know what image we want to create we help people to become a wannabe standing next to the ice or on the ice in the perfect outfit like the old man standing next to the road in their way to thight pants. (Maybe our figure skater image should stay away from the short skirts to keep everyones sanity…)

Creating Cultural and Social Value

Visit Flanders support events which add to Flanders: how can we get figure skating events to this level. At the moment we only have a few low level international competitions. By creating bigger international ISU competitions you have at least 2 people per international entre (skater and coach) who need a stay. When you are able to get big names to Belgium, fans will also follow. These fans will bring to the tourism sector and at that point we may have a great collab with visit flanders.

To get people to come to these competition we first have to create more hype around it. With owned and earned promotion in flanders over 2 months we got togheter +/- 500 visitors to a show with young local skaters. Create a hype, a persona, do more communication, and we fill a bigger venue!

Like said in my last blog figure skating is chique, so we should create an experience that makes people think WAUW. The sport itself does that, people who know nothing are even impressed with a programme of an adult like me. It is everything around it that we should work on. For more about this I would suggest reading my blog about what figure skating could learn about the symphonic orchestra.

Time, Space, and Accessibility: Learning from VF’s Smart Strategy

Figure skating is linked to a really specific season, as soon as the temperatures go down everyone puts on their skates. This leads to full rinks in winter taking training opportunities from competitive skaters and empthy rinks in summer creating problems for the rink owners.

What do we need? A campaign to create more buzz around the sport in summer. This will do exactly what visit Flanders tries to do: spread people in time. This gives everyone the chance to get as much out of their ice time as possible.

Th other thing visit flanders does is spread in space. How can we do this? More and higher quality winter rinks. The closer to go the easier it is for people to try. Put instructors on the ice and let schools come for gym classes and you are creating an opportunity for kids to descover the sport as well as helping the education sector.

In Tallinn there’re 17! Rinks all over the city spreading people all over the city and giving pro’s, wannabe’s, schools, etc. all there own space.

Sport as a Shared Journey, Not Just a Destination

The presentation and promotion of figure skating has a lot of potential which is not touched at all. Connecting to succesfull strategies like Visit Flanders passion idea can build a stronger foundation. We have to think bigger, more create, jump higher, step on top of the stage.