SCULTmarket application for matchmaking between sport mentors/coaches and citizens is a part of a larger SCULT Sport Volunteers Movement. Our holistic and community-driven approach ensures reaching wide target audiences and make a sizeable socio-economic impact to the sport volunteering field in Europe at large. This also makes the SCULTmarket application highly scalable across the entire sports industry.
The sport industry relies heavily on wide spectrum of volunteers. For example, in Finland 199 out of 200 people related to sport clubs and events are volunteers. Volunteers are the core component of sport service delivery and an important element of sport event management, since they provide sport administrators with the ability to maintain and expand the quality and diversity of a sport entity’s services. At the community sport level, volunteers serve as coaches, officials, team managers, administrators, board and committee members; with many individuals filling multiple roles. Volunteers also help to run sports events by carrying roles from “water boys”, to team leaders, up until fundraising managers and event organizers. Sport is also the most attractive field for volunteering, in which 7% of EU adult population take part either occasionally or regularly.
Indeed, the seamless access for sport event organizers to suitable volunteer candidates is nearly missing, both locally and internationally. The information about the volunteers, their skills, preferences and contacts collected from their involvement in previous events are not accessible anywhere, because each sport event organizer carries out the search individually. As sport events heavily rely on volunteers and their turnover is big, finding volunteers is a constant problem across countries and sport disciplines. Therefore, solving this challenge is the one of the main focuses of the proposed SCULT Sport Volunteers Movement and our technology platform.
Drawn from the current feasibility study and practical experiences during the process, there are three dimensions from where the SCULT business models will be further developed:
(a) Running a pilot project to successfully launch the focused SCULTmarket platform;
(b) Sport Volunteers community building (i.e. World Sport Volunteers Movement);
(c) Complex technological platform development to support both SCULTmarket and the overall Volunteers Movement.
Giving our good experiences with the SME instrument phase 1 and the fact that we will pursue with the project idea, we are planning to participate and submit a project proposal also to the SME instrument phase 2.
