What is it about?

The Canadian sport system’s landscape has been changing over the last decade, economically, technologically, and governance-wise. With the advent of the new Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act, we see an increase in structural and governance similarities between non-profit sport organizations, professionalization, performance, accountability, transparency, and stakeholder participation.

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Why is it important?

Non-profit sport organizations must now balance traditional sport activities/processes with more business based-aspects while dealing with uncertain economic realities. They have to compete for harder-to-get sponsorship dollars, needing to demonstrate a higher return on investment to potential and existing sponsors and partners (e.g., government and media). And like other non-profits, they must determine how to incorporate social media into their management and marketing activities, often without access to additional resources. How sport organizations handle these issues will affect their ability to garner sponsors, media attention, athletes, and spectators, which in turn will affect their performance and ability to obtain additional public and private funding that will then go back into grassroots to high-performance sport (or not).

Perspectives

This article shows how much we are now asking of our national non-profit sport organizations, which are run by volunteers. These are volunteer-based organizations now required to be run like for-profit businesses. And, this is on top of them having to manage a complex sport system with different jurisdictions (13 provinces and territories) and 13 different rules and laws. Not an easy task!

Milena Parent
University of Ottawa

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: A New Era for Governance Structures and Processes in Canadian National Sport Organizations, Journal of Sport Management, October 2018, Human Kinetics,
DOI: 10.1123/jsm.2018-0037.
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