The Brief

Run annually the Pirtek Fishing Challenge supports leading medical research organisations; the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and The Peter Duncan Neurosciences Research Unit at St Vincent’s Hospital.

Established in 2009, the Pirtek Fishing Challenge had experienced a decline in registrations and participation.
Our role included the review of participant data across multiple years, conduct participation research and present recommendations for improvements.

The Approach

We worked with 4 years of registration data to determine the following:

• What were the attributes of those that participated every year?
• What contributed to participants attending some of the 4 years but not all of them?
• How big an impact did Covid have on event participation?

Deduping 37,000+ records and allocating them to the 4 participation groupings, developing surveys and email communications followed.

The Results

The feedback from survey participants contributed to the changes to the event including changing it to a 2 day event.
Increasing awareness of the 2 charities who benefit from 100% of the money raised was an added bonus.
The event continues to go from strength to strength.