Booking for children's activities

Hi OpenActive W3C Group,

I'm Alasdair from Public Health England (PHE), where I am a Digital Product Lead. Nice to e-meet you all!

As some of you may know, PHE are early adopters of OpenActive, and launched a national open-data powered activity finder<https://www.nhs.uk/change4life/activities/sports-and-activities/activity-finder> in Q3 last year under the Change4Life brand, as part of an on-going commitment to using open activity data to help make it as simple as possible for the public to find healthy activities and get involved.

This new activity finder will help encourage families across England to get active and to make positive changes for the longer term. It is a product that will be available all year round as a source of inspiration and information for parents across the country, and we are currently preparing for another summer activation where the Change4Life activity finder could play a very prominent role. Over the last 6 months, Change4Life has been a powerful call to action for providers to open their data, because as a campaign we have wide reach in an important demographic (families and young children):

  *   91% of all mothers of children aged 5-11 are aware of Change4Life and 93% of these trust the brand.
  *   Since its launch in 2009 more than 4 million people have signed up and it now has more than 200 national partners.
  *   Additionally, there have been over 4m downloads in total of the Change4Life 'Food Scanner' app and its predecessors Sugar Smart and Be Food Smart. The total download figure for all Change4Life apps is 5.4m.
  *   The Change4Life website receives an average of 600,000 page views / 200,000 unique web visits every month, giving visitors access to information on healthy eating, recipes, activities and games.
Within the finder, we're already using open data from EveryoneActive, Fusion Lifestyle and Nottingham City Council, and also more local providers, such as ((BOUNCE)) and Our Parks, to name a few.

This year, we're exploring the use of making all these activities bookable through the finder. As such, I wanted to request that we include booking for children's activities as part of the scope for V1.0 of the Booking specification.

This is important to PHE as we use content to drive traffic to local provided activities to meet individual needs, and helps us with things like conversion measurement and ROI for the campaign.

Please let me know if there's anything I can help with to move the discussion forward and ensure this is included where possible.

Thanks,



Alasdair Gray
Digital Strategy and Innovation Lead
Public Health England
alasdair.gray@phe.gov.uk<mailto:alasdair.gray@phe.gov.uk>
020 368 20639


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