GSIQ THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES · PART 1 OF 3

Written by Nicole Hollomon, Managing Partner, United States

Every sports governing body I work with collects data. Participation figures, survey results, membership records, financial reporting, event attendance, program outcomes.

The filing cabinets – physical and digital – are full of the stuff. So, when a new client tells me they need “better data,” my first questions are often the same: better for whom, better for what decision, and did they collect data with their new purpose in mind?

While a lot of the time much of the data is there, that’s not the same as having the evidence. And that’s what people are often really asking for.

In essence the discussion needs to be about whether the available data were collected with enough intent, consistency, and methodological discipline to support the decision at hand. And that’s the real debate.

Collecting new slices of data in that situation? That often just makes things worse.

The gap isn’t information. It’s the right inputs, collected with intent and built for decisions.

In 19 years of building research functions inside governing bodies and rights holders, I have seen a consistent pattern. The organization conducts a participation study. The findings are presented in a board deck. The board nods. The deck goes into a shared drive. Six months later, when a budget decision or an advocacy moment arrives, nobody pulls the deck back out – because the findings were not structured to connect to that decision in the first place.

The participation study answered an interesting question. But an interesting question is not necessarily the question leadership needed answered. If the study was not designed around a clear decision or decision-making process, the organization is often left with findings that are credible in isolation but of limited ongoing practical value.

The problem here is that nobody designed the infrastructure to make sure the answer reached the person writing the advocacy brief, or the director building next year’s budget case, or the club trying to justify a program expansion to its board. The research was produced – a first and important step! But no one thought about how to operationalise it.

This is the gap I see most often across federations, national governing bodies, and sports organizations of every size. They don’t necessary lack information. But they may lack confidence that the information was collected for the right purpose, and they often lack the connective tissue between research and the rhythms of how decisions actually get made – board cycles, budget windows, advocacy moments, renewal conversations and strategic planning sessions.

So if you want to avoid that feeling of having collected lots of data but not having it in the shape your organisation needs this month, there are three things to consider before collecting more: whether the data you already have are fit for purpose; whether it can be connected to the broader picture; and whether it reaches the people making the decisions.

01

Dashboards are not the answer. Usable dashboards might be.

There is a tempting shortcut that many organizations reach for when faced with a data question: build a dashboard.

I understand the appeal. A dashboard feels like progress. It is visual, it is modern, it consolidates scattered spreadsheets into something that looks professional on a screen. It also gives you the feeling that you’ve done something useful with your data.

But I have seen enough dashboards that nobody uses to be cautious about the prescription.

The problem with most dashboards in sports organizations is not the technology. It is that the dashboard was centered on whatever data happened to be available rather than on the decisions people need to make or the real business questions users face.

The fields on the screen reflect what the system can show, not what the organizational leader, board chair, or club president actually needs to know on a Tuesday morning when they are preparing for a legislative meeting or a funder conversation on Thursday.

They can also create a false sense of certainty. A polished dashboard does not correct for inconsistent definitions, incomplete coverage, poorly designed survey questions, or data collected for an entirely different purpose.

As Joel Shinofield, USA Swimming’s Managing Director of Sport Development, put it after the organization recently transformed the way it did business: “The goal of our digital transformation has always been focused on providing better information to our coaches, athletes, clubs, and volunteers.”

Not more information. Better information. That distinction matters almost everywhere I work.

The lesson is transferable to any governing body: a dashboard designed around real organizational needs and day-to-day use is a decision-support tool.

A dashboard designed to impress a board with how much data you have is often little more than a screensaver.

02

Data silos don’t just slow you down. They distort the picture.

The second structural problem I encounter everywhere is fragmentation.

In a typical federation, participation data lives in one system, financial data in another, survey results in a third, and program evaluations – if they exist at all – in a fourth.

These systems were usually built at different times, by different teams, for different purposes. They do not talk to each other. They may also define the same concept differently. “Participation,” “engagement,” “retention,” or even “member” can mean different things across departments and systems. Combining those sources without first understanding how each was generated can produce a more complete-looking picture that is not necessarily more accurate.

This is not just an operational inconvenience. It distorts strategic thinking. When a board asks “is this program working?” and the participation data says yes but the financial data tells a different story, and neither connects to a member satisfaction survey conducted the previous year, the leadership team tends to pick the source that best suits their narrative.

The Gatorade Sports Science Institute framed this well in a recent analysis, noting that despite massive increases in data collection across sport, inconsistent storage and documentation make data challenging to use for long-term decision-making. Their conclusion was blunt: no singular discipline in a sports organization can claim to be data-driven without integrating other disciplines’ data sources.

U.S. Soccer offers a useful counterexample. When the federation decided to centralize its customer data, the initial driver was not a grand analytics vision – it was a practical one.

With a team of only 15 to 20 people working across marketing, product, and business intelligence, they could not afford to run campaigns for different audience segments manually. Centralizing data into a single platform was an operational necessity before it became a strategic asset. But once it was in place, it changed the quality of every decision that depended on understanding who their fans were and how to reach them.

This is what I mean when I talk about a decision problem rather than a data problem. The data exists. What is missing is disciplined integration: understanding what each source can and cannot support, aligning definitions where possible, and making the right data sources speak to one another – to answer the questions leadership is actually asking.

03

Get your operating model right before you do anything else

When I work with a governing body to examine this infrastructure, the work does not start with a survey or a dashboard. It starts with mapping how decisions are actually made: who decides, when, what information they rely on, and what is missing from their current view.

It also requires examining the data already in use: why they were collected, how consistently they were defined, and whether they can reasonably support the conclusions drawn from them.

Only then do we design the research agenda, the reporting cadence, and the tools around those real decision points. Sometimes that assessment confirms that the organization already has what it needs. Sometimes it reveals that new research is necessary – not because more data are inherently better, but because the existing inputs were never designed to answer the question now being asked.

In practical terms, this means structuring research outputs so they arrive before budget windows, not after. It means designing dashboard views for different audiences – an executive snapshot for the board, a more detailed operational view for program staff, a member-facing view for affiliated organizations or clubs.

It means connecting participation data to program data to financial data, so that when a leadership team asks “where should we invest next year?” the answer draws on integrated evidence rather than whichever department shouted loudest (or has the slickest dashboard).

At the NCAA, where I spent a significant part of my career, we built a platform around exactly this principle, returning data that member institutions had already submitted in a more usable form so campus leaders could apply it to school-level decisions and benchmark their performance against relevant peer groups.

The information was not new. The value came from organizing it in a way that made comparison and decision-making easier. I have since applied the same logic across governing bodies and rights holders with very different structures and priorities. In most cases, the organization is not short on information. It already has participation figures, membership reporting, survey results, program data, and stakeholder feedback.

What is often missing is a connected operating model that ties those sources together and routes the resulting insights to the people and decisions that matter: where to invest, what to advocate for, how to support members more effectively, and how to demonstrate value to external partners. Building that operating model — the data strategy, dashboards, research agenda and reporting routines, designed as one system rather than a collection of separate projects is what moves an organization from having information to using it.

The Real Question

The question I would put to any governing body leader reading this is not “do you have enough data?”

You may already have more than you realize. Instead, it’s do you have the right data, collected with the right intent and structured to support the decision in front of you? Can the person making your most important decision this quarter access evidence that is relevant, credible, and fit for that decision, in a form they can use and at the moment they need it?

If the answer is no, the solution is not automatically to collect more. It may require better inputs, more intentional research, or stronger infrastructure — and often some combination of all three.

The organizations that compete most effectively for funding, sponsors, and public support are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones that know which evidence to trust, where the gaps remain and how to turn the right inputs into decisions – consistently, at the right time and for the right audience.

If you want to find out more about how research can give your property or event the best chance of prospering, please get in touch. 

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