Case Study: How to get real engagement with fans of the future
17 March 2022
With research showing that the average age of sports viewers has increased markedly since the turn of the millennium, clubs and franchises face an ongoing battle to attract younger fans.
However, EngageRM’s innovative Community Portal is providing a launchpad for growth, giving sports teams the opportunity to forge deeper connections with youngsters around memorable moments and occasions. Great sporting experiences – at any age – leave life-long impressions.
The Out-of-the-Box solution is combining fan passion with automation and personalisation to help engage future generations of enthusiasts for some of sport’s biggest names – including the NBA’s LA Clippers via their ‘Kids Club’.
The innovation
“As the Clippers’ CRM technology provider, we are always seeking to develop new, or fine-tune existing, solutions that can help the franchise to enhance its interactions with fans,” EngageRM Senior Consultant Jonathon De Conno says.
“We deployed our online sign-up functionality that allows children to receive engaging messages via their parent or guardian’s email address.
From the Clipper Nation Kids Registration, we copy the parent email to the child Contact, along with their birthday and favourite player, and we name the Connection in both directions.
“We initially built the system on Customer Voice, a Microsoft survey tool, but after receiving feedback from the Clippers, we rebuilt the tool on our Community Portal to enable multiple children to be added under one parent or guardian. Our own solution is also payment gateway enabled, in readiness for fee-based registrations/sign-ups.”
How it works
“The basic details of the parent or guardian are entered at the top of the online sign-up form, followed by the child’s name and their favorite player and t-shirt size,” De Conno says.
“If the parent’s details are matched in the CRM system, a connection is made automatically to bring together the customer data for the parent and child.
“The franchise can connect with the child, via their parent or guardian, through Microsoft Marketing or other products. The team can send a personalized email from the child’s favorite player to wish them a happy birthday, for example, or can contact the parent with special offers on merchandise related to the favorite player, for example.
“The functionality is adaptable, so it can be tailored for multiple campaigns and initiatives. The franchise can send out automated ‘happy birthday’ emails to several children on the same day from stars like PG13 or Kawhi – and the solution can be used to interact with all Kids Club children or parents at the same time, to strengthen relationships.
“The parent can also manage preferences through the LA Clippers Email Preference Center, so this functionality is basically zero-touch for the franchise after the initial sign-up that auto-creates the parent and child and auto-connects them in both directions.”
Through the connection, we can dynamically address communication to both the parents and kids as well. A great example of this is how we can send personalised messages to kids from their favourite player on their birthday.
The benefits
“For clients like the Clippers, there are various benefits, and not just in relation to the multiple campaign possibilities,” De Conno says.
“The multi-purpose campaign management solution itself seamlessly extends the existing CRM system, so it is very familiar and easy to use, and the automation, supported by Microsoft Power Automate, really sets it apart by removing friction and barriers.
“The Community Portal solution is also ideally suited to clinics, family days, come-and-try events and other free, donations-based or paid-for use cases, with or without promotional codes. So, it is very scalable.”
Los Angeles Clippers Product Manager, Karl Gusner, adds that, “parents or guardians, along with their children, could also be interested in ticket packages, sponsorship, or NFTs, for example, and the system is underpinned by the Clippers’ sellable assets (or inventory), effectively providing a dynamic, personalized, interactive channel for our inventory and offerings.
“Above all, it pulls valuable data into the system from engaged individuals of different ages – and there are really no limits in terms of how it can be expanded to engage fans and strengthen bonds even further in the future.”
