Metro Bank won three awards at The UK Sponsorship Awards as the Champion of Women’s and Girls’ cricket: Best Sponsorship of the Year, Best Women’s Sport Sponsorship and Best Social Purpose Sponsorship – Community Focus.
Metro Bank won the recognition for its partnership with the England & Wales Cricket Board (ECB), which aims to drive transformational growth for girls’ recreational cricket across England and Wales by tripling the number of girl’s cricket teams by 2028. For the judges, the partnership was a standard bearer in the recent empowering growth of women’s sport as a commercial and community-based platform.
The Metro Bank Girls in Cricket Fund, co-designed and jointly funded by Metro Bank and the ECB, focuses on recruiting, educating, supporting and celebrating the people that make girls’ cricket in clubs happen. The Fund provides support to current and potential new coaches and volunteers, female and male, both in clubs with a girls’ section and those starting a new girls’ section.
After just one year in operation the Fund has achieved outstanding results - contributing to a 21% increase in the number of girls’ cricket teams to 463 and the delivery of 1,130 hours of in-club coach support. Thanks to the Fund, for the first time ever, there are more women than men (56%) participating in the ECB Coach Developer programme.
“We are thrilled by this external recognition of our commitment and ambition to work with the ECB to grow women and girls’ cricket,” explains Danielle Lee, Brand & Marketing Director, Metro Bank. “But what’s more important is the impact our partnership and the Fund is having within recreational cricket. We look forward to continuing to grow the partnership even further to champion women and girls’ cricket participation and success.”
Adam Raincock, The Space Between Co-Founder: “These award wins are proof that doing good and doing well aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s a unique partnership that is about creating a generation of girls that, through playing cricket, have a greater sense of confidence in themselves. It reflects the type of organisation that Metro Bank is – a business that puts people at the heart of everything they do. As an agency it’s a campaign that’s close to our hearts and we look forward to growing the game further with Metro Bank and the ECB.”