How to use data to punch above your weight in fan engagement
A 6-step guide to making a holistic data approach pay.
Step 1: Ask yourself the right questions
To punch above your weight in fan engagement, first you must understand what exactly you’re punching. Any effective and all-encompassing data strategy begins with an interrogation of your organisation, its priorities, objectives and problems. These will be unique. “Every organisation, in every sport, in every market fundamentally has different priorities,” says Russell Scibetti, Vice President, Strategy & Business Intelligence at the New York Giants NFL team. “If you have a ticketing sales issue, that’s going to change your approach. If you’re sold out and you’re looking at a customer retention and service issue, that’s going to prioritise something else. If you’re international and you’re not even worried about what’s happening at home and it’s a global strategy, that’s going to prioritise something else. Before you even think about data, it’s ‘what are we trying to accomplish?’ and working backwards from there.”
Assessing your organisation’s resources and ability to work with data is also critical at this stage. There will likely be financial constraints to consider, as well as human challenges: does your staff have the appropriate skillsets to collect, interpret, analyse and act on data? More widely, does your organisational culture chime with a data-driven approach? Anticipating and preparing for internal pushback from those directly or indirectly impacted is an often overlooked element of preparing and executing a data strategy.
"Before you even think about data, it’s ‘what are we trying to accomplish?’ and working backwards from there.”
Step 2 – Set your parameters carefully
Thanks to technology, fan engagement has never been easier – or as complex. Determining the parameters of your data-driven strategy – in other words, identifying and prioritising your key fan touchpoints – is the next important element in your approach. There are multiple ways of slicing and dicing, depending on the size and scope of your organisation, but a basic starting point is clearly dividing them up into in-venue and out-of-venue touchpoints.
Ultimately, anything you’re doing on the analytics side should have an impact on the fan experience, even if it’s not necessarily obvious or viewed as such. That might include scanning data to look at ingress and how people move in and out of venues. It could be analysing activity at concessions, such as method of payment, queuing pinch points. Mobile ticketing is another major data generator and can provide insight on how to reduce fraud, ticket transferability and simply knowing who’s in your building. Further away from the stadium, personalised content and the various metrics stemming from that is generating data that can be used to further enhance experiences and drive greater engagement. Gamification is another tool being deployed to enhance the fan experience and drive engagement itself, while unearthing ever richer customer data at the same time.
It’s also vital here to think beyond your most dedicated, core fans: that means considering the needs of casual fans and how new fans are ‘onboarded’, particularly a younger generation whose first touchpoint with a sport or team may be, for example, through a video game rather than going to a stadium or even watching a live game on TV.
Step 3 – Look beyond the numbers
Building a data plan is one thing, actually executing it is quite another and success will in large part be determined by your organisation’s structure, skillsets and attitudes. While training and clarity of communication are as important here as in any other part of an organisation, true cultural change does not happen overnight. It’s important to manage expectations.
Even when it’s happening, a shift in culture may not be immediately obvious. Scibetti advises keeping an ear on the conversation. “As you’re investing in data and technology, one of my anecdotal measures is ‘how many more questions do people ask?’ You can almost see the wheels turning and people saying ‘do we know this? Have we asked this?’ You see people who would normally just go right to a pitch going ‘let me ask the questions first, because I think we probably know more than I realise’. To me, that’s the cultural sign that you’re in a good position.”
Also be aware that not every system services every department and not everyone needs to know everything. Keep your staff focused on what they need and what they’re comfortable with.
Case Study: How the Portuguese Football Federation uses data to punch above its weight
Armis Digital Sport is the sports focused arm of technology solutions firm Armis Group. Over the past 11 years, Armis Digital Sport has developed a stack of tech products aimed at organisational management in sport, from competitions to matches, from discipline to refereeing, from registration to financial fair play, from venue management to ticketing, and from apps to fan engagement.
The company has developed a specialism in digital transformation, which has been borne out by the work it has done for and alongside the Portuguese Football Federation for close to a decade. The partnership has seen the Armis team more or less embed themselves within the federation to undertake what was initially a systems modernisation project, but which would now be understood as a root-to-branch digital transformation. The work initially focused on digitising what were then paper-heavy, inefficient administrative processes, but each year the project has taken a further step forward so that now, the Portuguese Football Federation is seen as a standard bearer in world football for its integrated approach to administering the game and engendering stronger, richer links between fans, players, and clubs of all levels across the country.
According to Portuguese Football Federation IT Director Hugo Freitas, upgrading the diverse legacy systems – player registration process and database, competition management system, national teams portals – into one integrated digital platform was a crucial, if unglamorous building block in setting the federation on its way to enhancing its focus on its fans. “It’s a financial and operational issue,” he explains. “You have to spend a lot of your time and resources to maintain aggregated systems. So we worked with Armis to upgrade 30 or 40 different services. As we started to free ourselves from the weight of all of these administrative processes, we were able to start working to collect data, to transform that data into information and into knowledge, so that we can make better decisions. Having started the process at the end of 2012, I believe it was 2015 that we created our first data warehouse.”
Having built out a bespoke API on top of Armis’ off-the-shelf ‘ProScore’ system, Freitas now believes that he has one of the most nimble software and systems set-ups in world football at his fingertips, and a set of fan data – and, crucially, applications for interpreting that data as insight – that would be the envy of any consumer facing business in the world. 70% of those systems have been built with Armis’ help. “It’s a very broad, very sophisticated set-up in total,” explains Freitas. “We have around 90-100 servers. We have 2 data centres where we have roughly 40-50 different appliances. We work in a digital eco system that is composed of around 40-50 websites for many different purposes. From the institutional website all the way to integrity and transparency services where people can submit their reports for match fixing activity and also where the clubs are required to provide data for licensing and for transparency purposes.
Fundamentally, the federation measures the success of its systems overhaul in player registrations – essentially customer sign-ups – which have increased year-on-year since the digital transformation process began. But it’s the type of questions that can now be asked, and, thanks to the data, that can now be answered, that particularly excite Freitas and colleagues at the Portuguese Football Federation.
“If we take the women’s football, let’s try to understand why are our numbers growing, because evidently we are funneling money into marketing campaigns, into new pitches, into a whole side of measures, but are we putting the money in the right place?” he asks. “One would be tempted to agree that if we are growing then we are, but that might not be exactly true. There might be outside factors that you don’t even control that are powering this.
One of the questions I normally ask everybody within the context of these kind of conversations is the following, ‘what would you say is one of the major factors a successful World Championship or European Championship?’ And people start going off in different directions and there is one they always forget which is the weather. So if it rains like hell people won’t have such a good time but when you go to the stadium and it’s sunny and it’s warm, and it’s an invitation to be outdoors and enjoying sports. Normally nobody ever considers this, which means that there are external factors that you don’t control that are powering such growth. And are we growing? But are we also receding? Do we have a lot of dropouts? Do we have a lot of people who are actually giving up and why are they giving up? And in the state where they are giving up, why are others surpassing the numbers of dropouts? Why is it that in this area of the country we don’t have the same kind of growth percentage in terms of women’s football that we have in others? Is it because it doesn’t have visibility? Is it because they practice at a schedule that is not compatible with working parents? Why is this happening? Why do we have clubs that have youth football but don’t have senior? Why is it that we have certain areas of the country where we have a lot of clubs and others that we don’t, just because of the distribution of the population, or is it because there is actually the absence of a programme that can recruit team managers, club presidents, people that are willing to engage in amateur football, create a club in the area, and engage with the municipality in terms of usage of the pitches that already exist. Is it because there is no pitch there? What is it that has actually happened? We can now easily check the results to all these questions and they’re very interesting.”
Armis have been working with the Portuguese Football Federation for close to a decade. IT Director Hugo Freitas comments on how upgrading the diverse legacy systems into one integrated digital platform was crucial in setting the federation on its way to enhancing its focus on its fans.
"As we started to free ourselves from the weight of all of these administrative processes, we were able to start working to collect data, to transform that data into information and into knowledge, so that we can make better decisions."
Step 4 – Listen to your fans. Really listen and create a virtuous feedback loop
It can be useful to think less about systems and more about fans as individuals. If you can create a connection, a real human relationship, listen in and then demonstrate you’ve heard what they’re saying, you’re on the way to creating a virtuous feedback loop which will drive engagement and ultimately lead to greater returns. As FIFA’s Director of Strategic Alliances and Innovation Benjamin Stoll puts it: “CRM is often looked at from the perspective of a technology, a platform, a tool, but it always needs to start with the human.”
Research remains the most direct way to receive feedback and the organisation that shows it will make changes based on fan surveys is likely to receive a richer range of responses they next time they ask. Conversely, make no mistake: fans will notice if they are asked for their opinions and nothing changes as a result. Knowing they have a voice and can help make a difference is powerful for fans.
Be sure to look everywhere for feedback, too. That might mean utilising sometimes expensive social listening tools, or it could simply be by making the effort to monitor reviews of podcasts or apps in Apple and Android stores. It all matters and doesn’t have to cost the earth.
Step 5 – Understand how your digital architecture fits together
However carefully the approach has been crafted thus far, it’s clear that for most sports organisations data sets and sources will be myriad – different types, collected by different platforms and all at volume. Spending time thinking about and understanding how your systems, tools and processes fit together is all-important. Mapping your architecture – and it will be your architecture, something unique to your organisation and its priorities - will also help identify any blind spots. Do for example, existing systems marry up with new – or planned – ones? Are upgrades required or sufficient?
At the same time, flexibility is key in order to refine and futureproof. “The more control and flexibility you can build into an open architecture the better you are set up to work towards clearly-needed solutions and new, arising demands,” Stoll says. “The more we are in control of the architecture the better we will be set up also to do iterations against behaviours and demands of fans and other stakeholders, which are constantly changing.”
Step 6 – Identify your biggest bang-for-buck focal point
There’s no single quick win, but as you prioritise and examine your budget, it’s worth considering what’s going to make the biggest impact on your organisation. That focus will of course depend on your organisation’s size, market and objectives.
For CONCACAF, governing body for football in North, Central America and the Caribbean, a recent focus on developing a new website – and the tender process for vendors to help - has proved instructive. “When you go through an RFP process, you can get too caught up in the look and feel of the website,” says Chief Commercial Officer, Heidi Pellerano. “If the site does not become a tool for the organisation, it is [at least] going to build the brand, but we wanted the website to be more that an outward expression of the brand – we really wanted it to be a fan engagement tool.” CONCACAF eventually selected Armis Digital Sport to oversee the new website project following one of the most thorough RFP processes it has ever undertaken.
Another common success story is the introduction of a CRM system – if, that is, there is a genuine reason for having one. “Locally, it’s the most actionable, it’s the most one-to-one, it drives sales, it drives retention, it drives service, it creates relationship,” says Scibetti. “That has the most local impact. When you go more global, it could be social platforms – but there’s so many platforms – so I also think of the marketing automation side. People often simplify that to mean email, but really it’s any messaging – email, push messaging, SMS – and the key is that it’s more direct than just social.”
And don’t forget those surveys: “If you’re purely wanting to learn about customers, dollar for dollar, you’re probably not going to get more value."
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