Each month, What's the Score? will shine a spotlight on a specific department within England Lacrosse, giving details of the work the staff in that department are doing.
March's spotlight is shining on the Marketing & Communications team consisting of Caroline Royle, Sean White and Jason Naylor.
Can you give us a general sense of your role?
Sean: I think from an overarching point of view, my job is essentially promoting the work of the organisation as well as promoting the wider game and things that happen within the wider game.
So on the one side, I would say we tell people about the things that we do as England Lacrosse and then promote what the people within the lacrosse community do/are doing too.
I feel like we as a communications team all work together in a sense but in terms of the more tasky/jobby type things that I do would be working on websites, keeping them up-to-date, planning and working out our social media channels; looking at different ways that we communicate with people so social media/email/newsletters, that sort of thing.
Jason: I think that's what I would say about my job as well; we've got the overarching stuff, but then Sean and I kind of work together a bit more on the task type stuff: the social media/website side of things, The Fly accounts as well as the England lacrosse accounts.
Caroline: My role is more looking at the bigger things like budgetary allocation, resource allocation, working with the senior team to work out priorities etc. And then filtering those down to try and sort of empower Sean and Jason to take the ball really and roll with what they need to do without me micromanaging every minute, which is good.
Also from a partnership point of view, I try to ensure that we sign the right partners to help us achieve what we want to achieve within both the comms area and wider.
What are the big projects you work on every year?
Caroline: I think it's very much dictated by priorities that are set at the start of the year and that means the focus in terms of resource, time, and budgetary spend is placed within certain areas.
However, you know these guys have to be all things to all people, so sometimes when there isn't budget spend or resources allocated to areas they have to do it anyway as they know. Even though we always say we're going to prioritise, sometimes it just doesn't happen that way because I don't think anyone ever wants to say no ultimately.
But I think as we get better at planning, it enables us to spend more within areas. So, for example, The Fly has good investment in terms of budgetary spends so we can work with third parties to achieve a good level of communications which certainly helps.
But there are things that are constants within our role like national squads and then reporting on the community game etc. (whatever that may mean) and the regular drum beat of comms that Jason does on the EL channels.
Jason: For me, the social media itself is kind of a big project that we work on all the time almost constantly. There's definitely different facets to that, whether it's like Caroline says the England squads, or if it's the university game or the club game or The Fly now. But that's kind of a big constant in our lives.
But then we've got all the stuff that we plan for every year like National Schools, The Fly or the School Challenge Cup, which we know it's going to happen every year and we know we need to plan for.
Sean: Events and competitions can sometimes feel a bit separate but they're quite linked in to what we do. Again, going back to the set of priorities decided on at the beginning of each year, when we know what these priorities are then that influences the events or competitions that we run and the resource that we put into each of those. So then that in turn then influences where we put our focus in the work on social media or in the work across the website.
So essentially whilst we do our own thing. Everything is linked in to trying to meet the priorities and trying to meet the requirements of each area.
What new projects have you been working on more recently and what are you doing or have been doing to get them off the ground?
Jason: The big new project is The Fly, right? We did it last year and we have the experience of last year, but then this year feels a lot bigger. We've got four new team Identities with four new Instagram accounts, we've set up a Tik-Tok account and we want to do everything that we did last year plus a little bit more and we want to do it better. So I think that has been the big project for this year.
And we've got what we’re calling ‘Brand Managers’ who are work experience students from UCLan in Preston and they're helping us out with the team accounts, so that's how we’re getting those off the ground.
Caroline: Yeah, and that would illustrate my role in terms of trying to get a better production company on board for The Fly to help in partnership with the event. So it kind of illustrates the difference in terms of my role from Sean and Jason’s roles. They're very much ensuring that the doing gets done, whereas I'm looking at how we can achieve that increase in quality through partnerships for the event.
Sean: I think looking at the bigger picture for The Fly and the new six-a-side format of the game, it’s essentially a massive new project for all of us in all areas of England Lacrosse. So, that's basically the reason for The Fly because of the creation of this new format with a look towards inclusion in events like the Olympics or the Commonwealth Games; things that can be pushed to a much wider audience.
So what we’re doing with The Fly filters through things like events and then filters through education and eventually filters through everything. So I think The Fly in terms of being a single project has been something we've been working on, but really the way the sixes game has just come into everything has been an even bigger project outside of just The Fly. We've had to help each area to incorporate the sixes game into everything that they do too.
Has your role changed during the pandemic and if it did, then how?
Sean: Pre-pandemic, our role was to talk about the things that were happening within the game, and for months and months no lacrosse was being played meaning there was no lacrosse to talk about and I think we became a bit of a middle man, bringing the game together at a time when they couldn't be together as such.
So you know, whilst generally people would meet at an academy or meet at the club at the weekend, during the early days of the pandemic, none of that could be done. So I think our role was to try and bring all those people together while they couldn't actually be together physically; we did webinars and trying to get people to do challenges and things online, create conversation around things whilst people couldn't actually play lacrosse.
Jason: I think we got pretty good at writing statements, didn't we? Whether that was cancellation statements for tournaments or just statements about COVID restrictions, it seems like that’s all we did for 18 months!
Also, I think that when we stopped doing a lot of the lacrosse type stuff, we began doing a lot more planning for things in the future just because everything stopped. Pre-pandemic, everything came at us so quickly and it was always all go but during the first lockdown we definitely had a bit of time to stop and think about the future and plan a little better for those things.
Sean: I think we opened up more ways of communicating with the game and with groups that we had never really spoken to before. We've now got new ways of talking to the game through webinars and video calls which weren’t really a thing before the pandemic and now they’re an integrated part of everything that we do.
Caroline: What we did realise as well was that internal communication was really important too and that’s why we’ve now got this internal newsletter.
Initially the internal communication was obviously important because we were all sat in our houses but since that first lockdown we’ve been looking to continue and improve our ways of communicating.
While we were all locked down, we did speak a lot and we did lots of socials and there was a lots of connectivity internally. Then as things relaxed and people were able to leave their houses and go back to a bit of normality, it did fall off a bit. And I think we've been able to reflect on that and say: “OK, we probably needed a break from doing it quite as much but actually, what can we re-establish that connects us again?” Because it was good that we were so connected at that time and I think this is a tactic to try and encourage that.
And I know we're looking to do more webinars (now people aren't sick to death of them), so I think there are a lot of good things to come out of the pandemic and I do agree with Jason that planning was definitely one good thing that came out of it; we wouldn't have been able to plan The Fly to the level that we did and we wouldn't have been able to do the Playground to Podium Strategy for the sixes game. All of that was able to be undertaken because we weren't out doing anything else.
So I think there are benefits but obviously stopping the game for 12/18 months wasn't great, but it did enable us to do stuff.
If you were stranded on a desert island and you could take just one item with you, what item would you take with you and why?
Caroline: Is a dog an item? Because I’ll take my dog who's going to live forever on the island with me - forever and ever.
Jason: I'm just going to go simple and I'll take a pack of cards with me because I know quite a few one-player card games so they would keep me occupied.
Sean: I’m presuming it's a hot island because it's always a hot desert island with these sorts of questions. Mine would be sun cream because I would burn in seconds if I was out on a hot desert island. That would actually allow me to look around rather than bury myself in the sand!
Caroline, Sean, and Jason have nominated the Talent department to be interviewed for April’s edition of Spotlight on…