Rugby World Cup 2019 Tier 2 Nations Campaign Reviews
Project Background
World Rugby’s Strategic Plan 2016-2020 guides the organisation towards its vision of “A sport for all, true to its values” via the mission of “Growing the global rugby family”. World Rugby invests in high performance initiatives, in order to develop the competitiveness of elite international rugby. This in turn creates a more competitive and more interesting competition and contributes to World Rugby achieving one of its key strategic goals to, “Maximise the commercial values and increase the financial sustainability of international rugby.”
The purpose of this project was to inform future learning and development planning for World Rugby and participating Tier 2 unions in the RWC 2019.
We sought to understand the barriers and enablers of individual and team performance during two key periods; firstly, in the pre-tournament preparation phase, and secondly in the tournament phase. Further, we investigated what worked, what didn’t, and what changes could be made to increase the opportunity for optimal performance in the future.
What we did
We developed two short online surveys. One survey investigated the preparation phase and was conducted in the week prior to the first pool game. The second survey was conducted between the third and fourth pool games. The surveys aimed to identify the barriers and enablers to performance for each team in each phase by investigating several performance related themes. To establish content validity, themes were identified through an extensive literature review and by engaging experts in the field of investigation including high performance consultants, players’ associations, management and support/medical staff from high performance environments and World Rugby. The surveys were available in English, Japanese, Spanish, Georgian and Russian. Separate but similar surveys were completed by three cohorts - coaches, players, and management/support staff, from the ten tier 2 unions.
Outcome
In all, 111 600 data points including 6 678 qualitative comments were collected and analysed to produce:
· A report for each of the ten tier 2 unions with data/graphs, insights and findings for their individual campaigns.
· A summary power point report with: data/graphs; major themes and insights, and; a comparative analysis across the ten participating unions.
“Thank you for Ihi’s excellent work on this RWC campaign review project. You have been responsive to our needs as this project evolved and it has certainly met all our expectations and deliverables.”
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We’ll work with you to find out what’s working, where investment could be put to best use or how to improve anything not going to plan. We can help you define success and set tangible, measurable goals. And we talk in real language so you can understand and engage with the findings. We engage with the community to conduct community research and consultations for private companies, trusts, government agencies, NGOs and more. But we have a special interest in research that has a purpose - to better society and teach lessons. We aim to help those we work with build capacity and enact positive change.
