Welcome to Edition 5 of the I Run Clean Ambassador Newsletter! We hope you are enjoying your summer and staying cool despite the extremely hot weather in much of Europe. Below is the latest news to keep you up to date on various aspects of our project.
Munich promotion plans taking shape
Just a few weeks after the Franco-German Youth Office and the French National Olympic Committee (CNOSF) confirmed they would provide the necessary finance, an organising team led by Cyril Savidan is making steady progress on preparations to promote I Run Clean during next month’s European Athletics Championships in Munich.
A 4m x 4m pavilion has been secured as a base of operations in the Athletics Market Square near the Olympiastadion and so far a total of 14 I Run Clean ambassadors from France and Germany have confirmed their availability for the period of the championships.
Cyril and the ambassadors will be supported by two of Fiona Olivier’s students from La Sorbonne Nouvelle, Sabrina Taleb and Eva Zettwoog, who will assist with social media communications throughout the championship week. German ambassadors Franziska Wölfl and Valentine Wolfgang along with a former LSN student of Fiona, Violette Gratien, are currently working on the planning and preparation tasks and they will all be on site to assist during the event.
The ambassadors in Munich have been set the randomly selected and very ambitious target of securing over a thousand new users for the I Run Clean e-learning programme from visitors over the seven days of the championships. They will assist with the registration process on the new users own smartphones and there will be several tablet devices available for those without a phone.
In addition to the happy smiles and warm words of the ambassadors, each new user will receive a branded I Run Clean wristband. They will also be asked to add their name to a large signature board near the pavilion and then Sabrina and Eva will help them share selfies and messages on social media.
To support our impact research work, the ambassadors will also encourage each new user to log on to a pre-intervention survey similar to the one used for our workshops. Later, as each completes the course they will receive an e-mail asking them to complete the follow-up survey.
Attention All Ambassadors! Please help promote the I Run Clean project by retweeting/sharing social media posts from your colleague ambassadors working in Munich and the new users.
More Munich News
Jean Gracia and French ambassador Florence Paris have arranged to present the I Run Clean project to the participants at the 7th European Athletics Young Leaders Fourm, which will take place in conjunction with the European Athletics Championships.
In addition to making sure that all the participants have completed the e-learning programme and received their diplomas, the aim is to inspire the young volunteers from countries not in the current Erasmus+ project to become involved by using (and adapting) the workshop template we are developing in the project.
It is also hoped that the forum participants will visit the I Run Clean pavilion at the stadium to sign the signature boards, share a selfie and maybe even give a few minutes of their time to assist with registering spectators for the e-learning programme.
Since 2006 more than 500 young volunteers have been invited by European Athletics and local organisers to the normally biennial Young Leaders Forum, which promotes grassroots projects that contribute to the sport of athletics and local communities.
Leaders e-learning module
The detailed script for the Leaders Module, the third and final I Run Clean e-learning module for athlete support personnel, has been completed. As we wait for final approval of the contents by the European Athletics Medical & Anti-Doping Commission, plans for the production are being developed by the I Run Clean project team and the Norwegian technology contractors Task.
Like the I Run Clean workshops, the three new e-learning modules focus on the values that make up the Spirit of Sport and they will contain scenarios where users are expected to apply their own values to challenging situations.
Visually, the three new modules will include elements that link them to the existing eight I Run Clean modules and there will be some interesting innovations, including input from real members of the athletics community (not actors) in the form of selfie videos recorded with smart phones.
The initial plan for the I Run Clean Erasmus+ project had only one module for athlete support personnel but as the brief for the module was developed the project team decided that modules specific to coaches, medical support personnel and sport leaders would have a bigger impact and so the plan was changed and additional funding was obtained from the International Athletic Foundation.
For timing reasons, the originally planned parents module will be produced after the current project giving the project team a chance to taken in the experience advice of the ambassadors who deliver the parents workshops during the project.
Platform use continues to increase
The latest data from the I Run Clean platform shows that 2022 is well on course to be the biggest-ever growth year for the e-learning program in terms of both new users and users who have received their I Run Clean diploma.
June saw 1,647 join the I Run Clean community by registering on the platform and starting the eight-module course, bringing the total number of users to 37,464 of which no less than 10,126 have joined in the first six months of 2022. The biggest growth year so far has been 2021, when 11,164 joined over the whole 12 months.
More importantly, 1,686 users completed the full e-learning course in June, bringing the global total of those earning their diploma to 30,990 of which 8,156 have done so already this year.
The spectacular upward trend confirmed by last month’s figures is important for the I Run Clean project as dissemination of our products (the e-learning programme and the I Run Clean workshops delivered by trained ambassadors) is a key success criteria of the main funder, the European
Commission’s Erasmus+ programme.
The project team believes increased communications efforts by federations, including several that are not part of our Erasmus+ project, has been mainly responsible for the strong growth so far this year. We anticipate that things will get even better as the promotional programme in Munich, the outreach of the workshops to new audience groups and social media sharing by our ambassadors create a snowball effect in the second half of the year.
Attention Ambassadors! Be sure to post about all your workshops and other I Run Clean-related
activities on social media using #irunclean and a link to www.irunclean.org. Also, don’t forget to like/comment/share about your colleagues posts. This is very important for promoting ourproject and the e-learning platform to the wider athletics community.
Finalisation meeting date- REMINDER
Be sure to save the weekend of 5-6 November 2022 for the workshop curriculum finalisation meeting in Paris.
Planning of the programme and contents is starting and further information will be communicated as it becomes available.