European School Sport Day 2018 – Flagship Event

The European School Sport Day® (ESSD) was inspired by the Hungarian School Sport Day, an event which has been organized by the Hungarian School Sport Federation (HSSF) for the last 13 years. It is a day dedicated to promoting physical activity and to empower the “belonging to the school” experience for every participant. During the first ESSD in 2015, around 1,000 events were organized in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Poland together with more than 300,000 participants, with funding through Erasmus+ (project title: ’European School Sport Day’, agreement number: 2015-1147/001-001). ESSD 2015 not only involved other countries to join this unique initiative as a pilot but also developed the basic documents that ensure the sustainability and enlargement of ESSD: the first toolkit and an action plan have been prepared and published by the members of the consortium that were ready to be used for all organizations and schools interested in joining ESSD the year after. In 2016, the ’Enlargement of ESSD’ project became a success story: it expanded to a total of 20 countries, and reached 1.5 million students, again with the funding of Erasmus+ (agreement number: 2016-1007/001-001). ESSD 2016 provided a magnificent opportunity to expand the international presence and popularity of the ESSD. With the involvement of multiple new partner countries, we were also able to extend the added value and goals of ESSD on many levels. In 2017, we linked ESSD officially to the European Week of Sport and the #BeActive campaign. The event expanded to a total of 26 countries, reached 2 million students and became the biggest sport event of EWoS. In 2018, the ‘ESSD – Flagship event’ project targeted to involve as many European countries as possible. We have implemented ESSD as a flagship event of EWoS and succeeded to reach 29 European countries and nearly 2.5 million participants. In addition, ESSD piloted beyond Europe in four countries of two other continents in 2018. This scale-up and extension of the Program in 2018 were only possible with the financial support of the European Union in the frame of the Erasmus+ Program. We are very pleased with these results and would like to further increase the scale of events organized in Europe and beyond in the future. The project has been implemented successfully in line with the set objectives, planned activities, and budget. The main accomplishments were:

• Production of new ESSD Communication handbook and Style guide.
• Authoring of new ESSD Sponsorship handbook.
• Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPI-s) for national ESSD coordinating organizations with three communication levels to choose from.
• Organizing three international project meetings (kick-off meeting, London, 11 January; ESSD Seminar, Budapest, 11-13 April; closing and evaluation meeting, Budapest, 16-17 October 2018).
• Revamping the essd.eu international website, developing the IT database of the school data so that every coordinator can access and process their own national data. Providing continuous help-desk support during the registration and reporting period.
• Providing financial support to 18 national ESSD coordinating organizations who were delegated either by ISCA or by EUPEA as a result of recruitment, to enhance their communication campaign. In return of the funding, the national organizations were obliged to undertake one of the three communication levels set in the KPIs.
• 17 EU member states have organized ESSD flagship events (one or more per country) that were reported in national media. In several countries, the main events concentrated on a central thematic topic, i.e. grassroots sport.

Project website:
https://www.essd.eu/