Road towards Innovative governance of NOCs and Grassroots Sport organisations

RINGS project aims to modernise the strategic management of National Olympic Committees (NOCs) in Europe with a specific focus on change management, relations with internal and external stakeholders and public affairs. The tools and outputs to be developed equip and support the NOCs in their daily operational management and thus improve their governance. The overall topic of the project is the strategic management of the sport organisations. This will be especially addressed with the following outputs: 1) handbook on strategic management which will address particularly the needed changes in the culture and mind-sets of the organisations as a “philosophy”, whereas outputs 2) stakeholder tool and 3) guidelines on public affairs will be more concrete tools to help in the practical implementation. Furthermore, master presentation and educational material for the National Training Workshops (output 4) will be developed. To ensure the sustainability and widest possible dissemination of the outputs, an online platform on strategic management (output 5) will be established, which gathers all the other outputs publicly available. In addition, 11 National Training Workshops (multiplier sport events) will be organised in the countries of the partner NOCs to disseminate and implement the developed outputs to the national sport federations and the staff of the NOC, as well as to test them and get feedback for the finalisation of the outputs. This will guarantee the transferability of the outputs to all NOCs in Europe and also to other sport organisations more widely. The project is led by the EU Office of European Olympic Committees, and has as partners the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and National Olympic Committees from the following countries: Denmark, Slovakia, Lithuania, Turkey, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Netherlands. After the RINGS project, the NOCs will be more flexible, better governed and prepared for the future.