David O'BYrne

Purpose: The aims of this study were to explore how the four tennis Grand Slams use social media to build relationships. Design/methodology/approach: We conceptualised Relationship Marketing (RM) as a sport organisation's broad strategy, with Organisation–Public Relationship (OPR) as a reflective lens. Aspects of OPR allow for a focus on the nature of relationship-building content, while platform engagement metrics provide observable behavioural indicators of audience response to that content. A content analysis of 5,456 posts from the tournaments' official X (formerly Twitter) accounts was conducted. Posts were categorised into three types based on the OPR relationship categories: professional, personal and community. Likes, reposts and replies were used to assess depth of audience engagement. Findings: Results suggest that tennis Grand Slams tend to use social media to develop professional relationships by sharing information and promotion. Posts characterised as personal relationship-building content generated the most likes, reposts and replies, suggesting that this content type was associated with stronger observable audience engagement. Posts categorised as professional relationship-building were less effective but generated more engagement than the much less frequently used community relationship-building posts. Originality/value: In this study, OPR and RM are novelly blended to best frame how social media is being used to build relationships at the highest level of tennis – a highly commercialised part of the sport eco-system. New insights about the nature and effectiveness of social media activity in sport have emerged from this study.

Purpose: This study is a first exploration of health promotion messages during a mega sports event. In total, 12 countries were examined for how health-related messages were communicated in relation to the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games via global and national partners. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, 12 countries were examined to investigate how the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games promoted health. The Global Health Promotion and Sport Events Survey was applied to identified messages produced by global sponsors and national-level sponsors that related to community health, physical health, mental health, environmental health and nutritional health. Findings: In total, 238 health-related messages were examined. The vast majority of these messages came from commercial, for-profit entities. When only one type of health was presented, this was often either community/social health, physical health or mental health. Environmental health and nutritional health appeared least often. Nearly half of the messages involved a combination of health types. Research limitations/implications: Paris 2024 was used by many corporate partners and National Olympic Committees to actively promote health-related messages around the world. A strength of this study was that it involved data collection from a range of countries. Practical implications: There are increasing concerns about detrimental effects from commercial determinants of health. Governing bodies of sport are encouraged to review partnerships which do not promote health. Social implications: There is opportunity to use the mega events to promote more specific actions relating to health, since the Olympic and Paralympic Games are occasions where social connection and celebration are likely to be inevitable. Originality/value: This study offers an audit tool and sets a benchmark for understanding how health promotion messages are manifested at sport events.

The Great Green Wall (GGW) Initiative aims at combatting land degradation while achieving socio-economic development across the Sahel through a mosaic of sustainable land management (SLM) and restoration practices. As the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the main funding mechanism for land degradation neutrality related projects, we have analyzed its previous SLM projects in four pilot countries in an effort to assess their capacity to foster scaling of interventions and fast track progress towards the GGW objectives. We developed a literature-based scaling evaluation framework and scoring methods to harmonize the GEF agency based project ratings in terms of performance and persistence along seven evaluation domains. We found that projects perform better over time particularly in terms of monitoring, financing and resilience to shocks but are overall only moderately likely to achieve benefits persistent over time, which is necessary to allow for the scaling of interventions. While these efforts should be maintained and further pursued, we also recommend special attention to be placed on a number of interventions that are often less successful or ignored by projects such as enforcing mechanisms for new SLM regulations, empowering vulnerable groups and ensuring sufficient capacity and finances for sustaining achievements even during periods of political or climatic instability.