Parkrun CEO Elizabeth Duggan on the magic of the model underpinning the participation sensation

11:36Elizabeth Duggan:And so we share not just the event delivery model, but also the ethos behind parkrun. And so that you see that manifest itself. I was in Munich on the 22nd of November doing a parkrun and they were wearing their tutus exactly the same way as because it's 22, in exactly the same way as they are in all over the world. And it's that kind of organic culture which accompanies parkrun, which I think is so special. But we do have a couple of founding principles which guide us in our decision making. The first is it's free for everyone forever. And there's a lot in that. It's free. It's obviously not free to put on.

12:18Elizabeth Duggan:And so we need to find revenue streams, but there would never be a charge to participate. And it's a fairly unique model in that we never cap how many people can come along on the day. You don't need to pre-book. You can just show up and be present there. And the for everyone is really critical to us too, because whether you are there to get your PB and you're running 16 minutes or whether you are park walking and you've been socially prescribed that park run is for you and creating that inclusive culture throughout it. And the second phrase which guides us is simple, scalable and sustainable.

12:53Elizabeth Duggan:So if you think about a park run, there is nothing that's surplus to requirements. We operate a very lean event delivery model. The equipment is just what it needs to be. And that enables us to keep on scaling. and it enables, it doesn't put overburden the volunteers on the weekend and it's sort of built in to be scalable, but also it's built in to be sociable. And so we don't have, you know, technological efficiencies that are maximizing how many people we can get over the line and creating real kind of chip timing. People are there to connect. And so when you scan your barcodes, when you walk through the funnel, there are people around you.

13:35Elizabeth Duggan:And so that really builds the culture for us. And I think the final piece of genius that Paul St. Hewitt put in place right from the beginning was recording times, because that has created a digital community as well. And people are so interested in seeing how they've done, how many times they've participated, where they've participated. And that's created a real sense of engagement across our community that keeps people coming back.

14:02Paul Sinton-Hewitt:It's the shareable bit, isn't it? It's the Aperol Spritz bit of Parkrun. Shareable on social, I mean.

14:12Elizabeth Duggan:Exactly.

14:13Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Do you think that Parkrun's success has come because or despite the sort of more traditional Sport England participation system?

14:21Elizabeth Duggan:I don't think it's an either or. I'm a big fan of uniting the movement. I believe that as a sector, we are underrepresented and undersold. that we have a much bigger role to play in society and that we can only achieve that role if we work collaboratively. And I think Parkrun is very much bought into the role that we can play within that. And so whilst we probably exist in our own ecosystem, we are a charity, we are part of the running sector, but we're also much, much bigger than that. And we are very much in that kind of community building space. So we are very connected into working with Sport England, very keen to do so, but also are kind of working in our own lane too, I guess.

15:11Elizabeth Duggan:We're probably partner agnostic. We just work with people that want to align to our mission and values.

15:17Paul Sinton-Hewitt:What is the nature of your sort of current relationship with Sport England or with sort of British Athletics or UK Athletics or any of the sort of more formal funded bodies that would consider running as part of their domain?

15:29Elizabeth Duggan:So we are a system partner of Sport England, so we do work with them very closely. And particularly as we try and focus more and more on inactive. So we have a target of about a quarter of our participant base being of a less active category, which very much aligns with the Sport England wider objectives. But we also know that there is a proportion of our community that are really motivated by running. We've spent some time as a running collective, so UK Active and the other home nation bodies, Daily Mile, London Marathon, Great Run, to talk about the future of the sector, to think about how there will be opportunities that we are well placed to take advantage of and what that might look like in the future.

16:14Elizabeth Duggan:So, you know, very much working at that kind of running level, but also very much working at that community building level too.

16:21Paul Sinton-Hewitt:You've talked about what you consider to be the fundamentals of Parkrun's success, but really zeroing in on, and this is where I think Parkrun has been really, really unusually successful, in motivating what you call inactives to get up and participate. What's the secret to that? How do you get an inactive active?

16:44Elizabeth Duggan:It's not easy. And I wouldn't say we have a silver bullet either. We have up on the wall in our office the photo of that initial start line. Yeah. 14 people, very much runners. Right. And we have built from a running community. And that was our roots. But as we've grown, we've been able to widen that net. But there is more work we need to do, because if much of your growth comes from word of mouth, you need to make sure you are still reaching into those communities that are disconnected from parkrun. So we've been quite intentional about how we've been doing that. I referenced earlier the social prescribing work that we do.

17:24Elizabeth Duggan:So we have now about 2000 GP practices who've signed up to socially prescribe parkrun. And we recognise that actually, if you're inactive, running 5K is a big step. So we've really been pushing park walk and we've seen that awareness of park walk has been growing and we classify a walker as someone that takes over 50 minutes to participate. So we're monitoring that and we're trying to draw more people into that. we're also thinking about where our park runs are so we have managed to set up a network of park runs within the custodial estate so within prisons I actually visited one a few weeks ago and I saw the impact that that has on the inmates so there was a grandmother who happened to be in in this particular prison and she would share times with her grandson who was park running on the outside and it was something that that really brought them together and then we're doing a lot of work now with our junior program so the two kilometer run on a sunday and i'm working in partnership with with people like the daily mile and we've just uh and london marathon foundation and we've just launched a parkrun primary initiative which pairs junior schools with parkrun um and really creates that kind of read across from the school to the community and we've got about 2 000 schools now signed up to that as well which is enabling us to reach more and different children.

18:48Elizabeth Duggan:So I would say there is no single route that gets inactives into park run, but trying to find those better entry points in and then really supporting that kind of culture once you get there. Yeah.

19:00Paul Sinton-Hewitt:In your view, where's the best park run? What's the quickest one?

19:04Elizabeth Duggan:Oh, Battersea is a fast one. It's a cliched answer, but I really do love Bushy Park. I think there is just something uniquely special there. The number of people you get, the single lap course, You know, the fun in the funnel while you're waiting for your time. I really like that one. But shout out to my own parkrun, which is in Woking.

19:24Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Yeah, very good.

19:28Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Quick break from the show. But if you're a senior leader in sport, this is a message for you. Leaders meet innovation. Our two-day event experience taking place at 180 Studios in London is just around the corner. On stage and in the room on the 11th and 12th of March, you'll find senior executives from the likes of The Guardian, Eurovision Song Contest, Arsenal Football Club, Kansas City Royals, Pizza Express and McLaren F1. And you can join them in a range of facilitated, targeted discussions across the two days. To find out more and to snap up one of our limited remaining passes, head to leadersinsport.com forward slash innovation.

20:06Paul Sinton-Hewitt:That's leadersinsport.com forward slash innovation.

20:13Paul Sinton-Hewitt:I know this is sort of part of your mission and you did touch on a few sort of schemes that you're using to reach people but this the sense of community and the accessibility bit which I know you're working on yeah how do you do that how do you give something to someone and then

20:29Elizabeth Duggan:they take it on and it becomes theirs we never give it to them it comes from them in the first place. And I think that is the magic of the model. The event teams are invested in setting up their own park run. They are the ones that source the initial volunteers, that seek out the landowner permissions, that source the initial funding that's required to set up a park run. And so it comes from them in the first place. And all of those things create a sort of sense of commitment to making that parkrun work across that community. And so they are very much invested in making it work. So, you know, we are facilitators of parkrun, but we don't make it happen.

21:15Elizabeth Duggan:It's those people that are there in the rain, week in, week out, that really are the magic ingredient to making this work. But I guess the model also, as I've said before, is very much structured around community building from the first time as briefing and the, you know, applauding of people for where they've come from to going for a coffee afterwards. And, you know, the sociable token sorting that happens at the end. Really, there is so many opportunities in a parkrun event for people to come together. And we just see so many acts of community building that happens at every single event.

21:51Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Do you, I mean, I know for a fact that there are sort of super users of parkrun. There are people who do it every weekend and who seek out sort of different courses. And do you actively try to use those people to be kind of ambassadors for you?

22:07Elizabeth Duggan:So we are about to have our first person reach their thousandth milestone, which is quite remarkable when you think it is only ever a weekly event that they have managed to reach so many park runs. And we will be celebrating that this summer.

22:23Paul Sinton-Hewitt:That's extraordinary, isn't it? How many is that? That's what, 20 years of every weekend?

22:27Elizabeth Duggan:Yes, exactly. Exactly. So we're really keen to celebrate that event. We do have layers of volunteers. And I never cease to marvel at the commitment that the volunteers will bring to this and the passion that they bring. So we have regional ambassadors, ambassadors, and then event teams. And we try and we have volunteer coordinator paid roles that try and support those volunteers the best they can by communicating, providing information, training and development, all the things that we can to make that work as effectively as possible.

22:57Paul Sinton-Hewitt:One of the things that I think is so good about Parkrun is it is so simple and easily explainable. And it strikes me that, you know, you and your predecessors have been really judicious about not being too ambitious, I suppose, not trying to tag on bits and pieces that don't necessarily work. But I'm sure along the way, there have been maybe some missteps, some sort of things that haven't worked. And I wonder whether that's accident or design, that it's been really simple. There haven't been that many additions to it. And then also, where do you see it developing? Is it going to expand? Do you want to build it into something else?

23:37Elizabeth Duggan:I think we now know that we want to stay in our lane. I can't see us in the foreseeable future diving into park swim, but we are very keen to play a role to support any organisation that would like to. And so we do spend time mentoring other park propositions that come our way. and I think that's the role we're happy to play in that. We have definitely made mistakes along the way and there are things that overburden our model. We've had various challenges that the community have put in place that will swamp a particular event and we knew that we had to take the decision to control that historically.

24:17Elizabeth Duggan:We also know that if we put on extra events on different days of the week they can get swamped so really sticking to our Saturday and Sunday with one special day a year and keeping that model simple, like I said at the beginning. But yeah, I think knowing who we are and sticking to that simplicity has been absolutely key to our success.

24:37Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Yeah. Do you have sort of, I mean, clearly international expansion is a potential route. 24 countries now, do you have an ambition to go into other countries? Are there some places where you're very strong, some places where you're active, but not really active enough at the moment?

24:54Elizabeth Duggan:So international growth is interesting for us. So it is largely been led by passionate individuals who've taken the parkrun model and seeded it elsewhere. And in the main, we've said yes to that. And so, you know, we've just seen this gradual organic growth of countries. But we are in a place now where we are at that tipping point, the kind of chicken and egg place where in North America, we've got about 150 events across the US and Canada. And that's been largely led by one paid member of staff. And obviously, the US is a massive place. The brand doesn't have the same cut through it has over here.

25:33Elizabeth Duggan:So we really need to focus on revenue generation in order to grow the team to continue to be able to operate over there. So I think we're in a lot of countries where we're in that kind of chicken and egg place where we are so we're big enough, but not so big that we've managed to make it financially sustainable. So, we need to make a choice as to whether we carry on growing those countries, those kind of developing countries, as we call them, or we go into new countries. And I don't think it's an either or, but in the short term, it's a focus on those developing countries. We're putting the right governance in place, the right strategy in place, the right partnerships, what I'm calling creating the conditions for growth over there.

26:15Elizabeth Duggan:And then I think towards the back end of the 20s, we will see more territory growth.

26:21Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Are you in Australia?

26:22Elizabeth Duggan:We are, yeah, second biggest country for us. I thought as much.

26:25Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Yeah. So I went for a run in Australia the other day. I went round, just by chance, it wasn't a park run, but I had a run around the outside of the Botanic Gardens in Melbourne. Don't know if you've ever been there. I'd never been there before, but there's sort of a, what's, it looks like, I mean, it's a sort of dirt track around the outside of this, I think it's about 4K, the loop. But it really struck me, there's so many runners there, obviously it's a sports mad place in Australia, but they've got these digital installations around the track, which just have, they're just running information.

27:01Paul Sinton-Hewitt:And it's got basically sort of lap record holders in lots of different categories around this sort of fairly innocuous kind of multi-purpose running route. And it just, I've never seen that in any country that I've ever been to. And it struck me that for an organisation like Parkrun, maybe looking at commercial partnership opportunities with the likes of Strava or, you know, other kind of running apps, having physical installations around parks might make a lot of sense. But I wonder, you know, whether that's a route that you've thought about before or what the obstacles to that kind of thing would be?

27:40Elizabeth Duggan:Yeah, no, we haven't. We haven't thought about that kind of thing. But I would say, whilst I feel sure that we are not going to move away from running to just to return to the previous conversation I'm not sure we're really completely clear on what our end end game needs to be and I think with the brand that we've got and the participation base that we've got I think we we should and could be playing a bigger role in embedding a an ability to run in you know the built environment and, you know, influencing for our sector. And whether that kind of physical build plays a part in that, you know, remains to be seen, but definitely more to come from us in terms of raising our voice for kind of collective good.

28:23Paul Sinton-Hewitt:So a couple of questions on being a CEO, being the CEO of Parkrun. Give us a sense of what the organisation looks like in terms of like permanent members of staff and then volunteers. Like what are you looking after as an entity?

28:37Elizabeth Duggan:So we're pretty lean at Parkrun. We're about 80 staff and then we have 50 ,000 volunteers every weekend. So, you know, a volunteer base is absolutely critical to us. And those 80 paid staff, we recently put together an animation which really summarised what happens in Parkrun behind the scenes to make it work. But obviously, we have a number of people that manage new event inquiries, all of the logistics around events, incident reporting, slips, trips and falls, safeguarding. And then we have a really critical digital and data team because we have to publish half a million results every single weekend, which is, you know, half a million results emails going out.

29:22Elizabeth Duggan:All the data storage and data management, data analysis, and then obviously kind of governance team, risk insurance, compliance, all those sorts of things. So, yeah, everybody at Parkrun works very hard. And we've recently been doing some analysis of kind of culture and values. And everyone at Parkrun comes to Parkrun with a real passion to make a difference, whether it's coming from that kind of charitable angle or whether it's coming from a really deep rooted love of Parkrun. Everybody is there because they care. Yeah. And that makes it a really easy place to work.

29:57Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Well, it's rare that I think you find a CEO saying it's an easy place to work. you know that's great probably the wrong word easy in terms of culture what do you feel like you've learned about the role of ceo since you've been in this one

30:12Elizabeth Duggan:so i think a very quick learning was that we do have this phenomenal community and um you know the passion commitment can be a double-edged sword because people really care they are really

30:24Paul Sinton-Hewitt:invested people feel like ownership right they own their own events exactly and so sometimes

30:29Elizabeth Duggan:that could manifest itself as being a bit fearful of action because we were scared of the consequences of what might happen. So, you know, what I've been trying to instill is a preparedness to take risks. One of our values is bravery to kind of retain that value, but without forgetting to manage that risk and thinking through how it could manifest, how we communicate it, have we engaged around it. So, kind of rapid decision making, but also with that kind of cognizance of the wider impact of it.

31:04Paul Sinton-Hewitt:So, you'd be fearful sort of as an organisation of the potential kickback, as in like, this is a bad decision. Why have you done this? You can't change this, that and the other.

31:13Elizabeth Duggan:Exactly.

31:14Paul Sinton-Hewitt:So, could you give me an example of like a decision that has been something that you have done that has demonstrated kind of bravery, one of your values, where you've had to maybe deal with a bit of kickback, but you've done it in a way which has worked out well.

31:26Elizabeth Duggan:So buying the app was a great example of that. So we decided to move forward with the app. It's so popular and so loved. But I spent time reading the social media posts after we announced the acquisition.

31:40Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Always an error.

31:42Elizabeth Duggan:And we came across as the fun police. So, you know, Park Run HQ is going to ruin it because, you know, it has come from the community and now we're taking this over. And what we really absolutely intend to do with the app is to keep running it in a way that aligns with what the community wants and needs. And so really building and we've recruited a user researcher, really kind of baking in community engagement into the way that we operate so that we are treading the right path of progression and, you know, giving communities what they need, but also managing the sides of it that we have to oversee.

32:20Paul Sinton-Hewitt:What skill would you say you've had to develop since doing this job?

32:24Elizabeth Duggan:I think I'm, I think upskilling in digital and data transformation. We have a long journey to go on our digital and data capabilities. We have, you know, I think what we're finding is that business as usual has been so much for Parkrun, you know, as we keep on growing double digit and that transformation is really hard to happen in parallel. We have, I've brought in two new members of my leadership team since I've joined. One is a new head of digital and data who comes from the ECB and brings really great knowledge of digital transformation, which has been fantastic. And the other one is legal and governance, which is absolutely also critical for our growth as we've snowballed.

33:08Elizabeth Duggan:We, you know, maybe going back a step and thinking about how we structure our international entities, what our delegations of authority are, what the trademark looks like for us so that we're getting that bit right. those kind of foundational pieces which will enable future growth.

33:24Paul Sinton-Hewitt:If you had to distill down a sort of a nugget of advice for another sports body or any kind of entity which is looking to replicate the success of parkrun and getting people active and getting people engaged in a sporting community, what would that distillation of advice be?

33:42Elizabeth Duggan:Oh, so many things running through my head.

33:45Paul Sinton-Hewitt:You talked about being open to, you know, if someone wants to do park swim, you'd be open to

33:49Elizabeth Duggan:Yeah. And I think my advice comes from a similar vein, which is get your culture right. I think Parkrunner's always known it was meant to be more than just a physical activity. It was meant to be a community building and sticking with that ethos and making sure that you are welcoming and inclusive from the get go.

34:11Paul Sinton-Hewitt:There's almost something sort of Forrest Gumpish about the sort of foundational mission, isn't it? Just run. Just run.

34:18Elizabeth Duggan:Exactly.

34:19Paul Sinton-Hewitt:You know, all these people run with you. Final question, Elizabeth. What is your current PB, Park Run PB?

34:26Elizabeth Duggan:Oh, I'm exactly, I'm a model of inclusion because I'm nice and slow. Yeah. So I'm happy at my kind of 35 minutes.

34:34Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Okay.

34:35Elizabeth Duggan:So I'm, yeah, I'm below the national average time.

34:39Paul Sinton-Hewitt:What's the national average?

34:40Elizabeth Duggan:I think in the UK, it's around 32 minutes.

34:43Paul Sinton-Hewitt:Crikey, okay. Are you working on that? Is that coming down or is it going up?

34:46Elizabeth Duggan:well i i spend too long talking yeah so um chapter box at the back i yeah exactly i like to be able to to speak to people find out how they're feeling um so yeah not chasing a time chasing the the uh

35:00Paul Sinton-Hewitt:chasing the vibes chasing the vibes exactly elizabeth duggan thank you very much indeed thank you