ETTA Table Finder
Geolocative web & mobile application
Our role with the the English Table Tennis Association is to engage people with the sport and raise participation as much as possible. We quickly came to realise that one of the biggest catalysts to participation in the sport would be in enabling players to easily find venues where they can play in an informal manner, with their friends and family.
TableFinder has proven to be one of our most powerful tools in raising participation Richard Pettit, ETTA
To this extent, we set about creating a cutting edge platform to help users find nearby tables where they can play. These might be traditional venues such as clubs, or more accessible arenas such as pubs and clubs, the only thing that matters is that they have a table free to use.
Building on top of the Google maps API, we created Table Finder, a platform which very simply supplies the nearest venues to play table tennis. On a desktop computer, these results will be based around the address or postcode you’ve entered. However, if you’re using a GPS enabled device the results will automatically be returned based on your current location.
You can also save venues to your “Where I play” list, allowing you to share where you like playing via an embeddable badge which you can include on your blog or social networking profiles.
We also built a Facebook application to allow you to share your venues via the massively popular social networking community.
Allowing users to share their data in this way will have huge benefits in attracting new users to the table finder, as it’s reach will extend across numerous platforms that otherwise wouldn’t drive attention to the ETTA or table tennis in general.
By opening up the platform, so that any user can add a venue, the ETTA is now establishing a massive database of venues offering table tennis facilities that they would otherwise have no idea existed. As a result, they can establish partnerships with these venues to help drive the sport forward and establish table tennis as a leading leisure activity at a grass roots level.