11 September 2020

How well do sports know their customers and what they really want?

Understanding your sport's customers and what they want is difficult in a federated model when your participants interact with different organisations for different services.

While the advent of digital technology has allowed start-up businesses to innovate by understanding customer motivations and behaviours and tailoring services to customer needs, when established industries operate in siloes, and have separate systems to run different services without the ability to knit together customer data, the ability to be agile and adjust products and services to suit changing needs of customers can be cumbersome.

Enabling sports to connect their data, better understand their customers' behaviour, and leverage that in the design of their services, could be a major key to unlocking participation and revenue growth in the future.

Sport Australia’s Digital Delivery team is expanding its work with National Sporting Organisations, focused on improving the connection between sports and participants so the sporting experience can be enhanced for all. This work is focused on building data systems that can personalise the sporting experience for every single participant.

Think about your online shopping experience - if you buy something online, next time you visit the site it will intuitively know your preferences and even start to suggest similar purchases. It’s the same if you book a hotel, watch a movie on a streaming service, or engage with something on social media. These platforms get to know your personal likes and dislikes so they can customise your experience, and before you know it, you are recommending these services to family and friends.

But in sport, participants are often lost in a digital maze, juggling membership numbers and fee renewals, or getting spammed with unwanted communications from all levels of their sports – local, state and national. It’s a scatter-gun approach and for a customer it’s far too easy to hit unsubscribe. In sport, where there is a 30 per cent churn rate of participants every year, you can’t afford to lose customers.

Sport is in competition with other industries for the recreational time of Australians, so we need to make every interaction count. As one sport told us recently: “Hope is not a strategy.”

The SportAUS Connect project is about personalising the digital sporting experience. It’s about helping sports understand their customer, so ultimately, they can give them what they want.

This is new technology. It’s a digital highway that will first connect sports to their members – participants, administrators, coaches, officials and volunteers—and in time with more uptake and data collection, it will better connect Australia’s sporting industry.

Sport Australia’s Digital Delivery team is taking an agile approach to deliver three key products to sports, all of which are scalable and committed to protecting privacy.

1. SportAUS Connect is the flagship platform allowing membership, participation and organisation data to be shared across all the systems a sport uses to engage with its members and stakeholders, such as membership systems, event management systems and websites. The simplest example is a single sign-on for a participant across multiple systems. It’s one less barrier to participation improving the customer experience.
2. The Sport Industry Accelerator (SIX) uses the power of cloud computing to bring together all the data across various systems so sports have a better understanding of how many members they have, and what their participation preferences are such as timing, location, and type of sport. Instead of checking pages of spreadsheets, sports administrators will be able to use the data platform to analyse trends, and use this information to inform when and where they run competitions, and how they communicate to stakeholders to get the best outcomes for participants and the sport.
3. The Sport Design Systemhelps sports improve or start new websites or apps by providing components and templates such as player profiles, competition draws, live scores and video highlights for sports to use ‘out-of-the-box’ or to customise. This approach saves sports valuable time and money. It provides sports with a quality and sustainable product, as the components are continually improved using open source components and governance, leveraging the power of developers across the sporting community.

Sport Australia is focusing on digital solutions that can be adapted and shared across Australian sports, so we know it can’t be one-size-fits-all. Our solutions have been co-designed with multiple sports to ensure they can meet the needs of all sports. Sports are already engaging with these new digital products and beginning to see the benefits:

• Cycling Australia has been our pilot project and has gone live with SportAUS Connect and SIX. Cycling Australia Chief Operations Officer John McDonough says: “SportAUS Connect and the Sport Industry Accelerator will provide valuable insights to focus on ways to increase membership value, reduce churn and grow our membership. Most sports I talk to don’t possess the systems and tools to mash together membership, event participation and ‘web click’ data. Without the input and support of Sport Australia, we simply wouldn’t have had the expertise and resources to achieve this.”
• We are working with Cycling Australia and Basketball Australia to design and develop easy to understand reports that will help inform how members are engaging with their services. We anticipate the groundwork on these projects will help us pass the learnings on to other sports.
• We’re working with Surfing Australia and Hockey Australia to integrate their membership and competition systems with SportAUS Connect and anticipate these will be delivered in the coming months. Integrating data is the first step, before implementing data analysis and digital marketing (leveraging SIX), and delivering more flexible online services (leveraging the Sport Design System), to get a deep understanding of the needs and behaviours of their customers, and to personalise engagement with their members and customer base.
• We are putting together the first version of the Sport Design System, with Rugby Australia, to help build their new web platform using reusable components. Rugby were planning to move their websites to replace an aging content management system. However, as they had more than 30 websites to move, they were daunted by the mountain of work ahead of them. By taking a Design System approach, Rugby had an initial proof-of-concept site available on their new platform within weeks, while building a library of headers, footers and buttons that can be reused if they need to add other sites in the future.

Sport Australia’s Digital Delivery team will work closely alongside interested sports to understand how these products could best benefit the sport and it's members, and to ensure readiness of systems, teams and technology vendors before implementing.

To learn more about these products, please contact digitalsports@sportaus.gov.au or visit https://www.sportaus.gov.au/sportausconnect-docs