Motorsport UK

The Challenge

Motorsport UK is the national governing body for four-wheeled motorsport in the UK, working with over 15,000 volunteers and additional paid coaches and staff every year.

The organisation has significant screening requirements; however, it only has a small team of safeguarding specialists who conducted over 1,000 DBS checks in 2024, with this number anticipated to rise further in 2025. The body was experiencing challenges manually reviewing, processing, and adding a high number of checks, with its CRM offering limited automation and support in this regard.

Motorsport UK govern 13 different disciplines of the sport, and manual vetting processes led to an exceptionally high number of different platforms being used for information management and multiple locations for data storage. This added complexity created a potential risk of human error and led to gaps in end-to-end screening processes.

Equally, the lack of insightful data also made it challenging to get a full understanding of the issues facing the broader community and to ascertain which roles and individuals required vetting or re-screening. With pools largely filled by senior volunteers who were given limited autonomy and independence when it came to managing their screening, Motorsport UK’s internal team had to monitor DBS expiration dates manually and then update volunteers via email or phone.

The solution

Motorsport UK collaborated with First Advantage in 2019, and in 2024 established the motorsport management platform, powered by Sport:80, to improve their member services. The organisation’s previous CRM did not interact or link with First Advantage platforms; however, the Sport:80 platform allowed for full integration. From the off, the partnership introduced several tech-backed processes which supported the streamlining and automation of licence renewal periods and flagged to both the safeguarding team and the individuals themselves when volunteers were required to renew their documentation. A new automatic reminder system was established to ‘nudge’ users along the process, making screening far more efficient, coherent, and manageable for all parties.

In addition, First Advantage and Sport:80 set up ‘dependencies’ which prevented volunteers from securing licenses without having their approved DBS checks in place, and started a ‘no licence, no participation’ system to mitigate compliance risks.

The impact

Motorsport UK has seen significant improvements in its screening and volunteer management since working with both Sport:80 and First Advantage. Our partnership has reduced the need for manual oversight of compliance activities, which has not only expedited the end-to-end process, and improved the organisation’s ability to meet compliance standards, but has also reduced workloads for safeguarding and membership teams. Both functions had previously spent a significant amount of their time manually reviewing DBS processes, but by putting their trust in the technology-backed solutions provided by Sport:80 and First Advantage, were now free to support more strategic tasks and activities.

Motorsport UK has also benefitted from reduced human error and having access to key data points. This allows the organisation to make more nuanced and strategic decisions, also enabling all team members to better understand safeguarding requirements and processes.

Ciara Nicholson, Safeguarding Officer at Motorsport UK, commented on the partnership.

It has been a great experience working with Sport:80 and First Advantage. Collectively, they appreciate the challenges we face in meeting compliance standards, but also in providing a positive volunteer and customer experience. The partnership has delivered significantly improved screening processes across Motorsport UK which will only optimise further in the future. Far fewer individuals are at risk of slipping through the cracks, meaning that we can manage compliance more comprehensively and effectively than in the past. As the partnership is still in it’s infancy, we anticipate this collaboration will evolve further as our Motorsport UK team and it’s volunteer pool continue to embrace the Sport:80 platform and the individual user-friendly processes.”