What is CRM and do you need a CRM strategy? Where is our data and who has access to it? Creating a single customer view Do you communicate with your members, participants and spectators? What do you know about the data you have? Data is a valuable commodity. It can provide you with an insight into your fans and participants, helping you build a picture of what they like and don t like, where they live, how old they are, how often they participate in your sport and so on. Using that insight you can tailor the information you send them, ensuring they only receive communications that you know are relevant to them. By filtering the information you send people, they are more likely to read it which will serve to increase their level of engagement with you. It can also help you determine how you attract new fans and participants. By understanding who your current fans and participants are you can target promotions and marketing more directly to those that you know are more likely to be interested in your sport. However, you can only achieve this if your data good quality (i.e. accurate) and is well-managed. Having a database of 80,000 names and addresses is one thing but if you can only communicate with them by post, as was done in the past, then the data is not as valuable. If your data is not cleaned regularly, i.e. it has many duplicates or details are out of date, this will also devalue it. Do you have a database of people that have purchased tickets and attend your events, a separate database of people who buy merchandise and another one of those who are paid up members? Does each department communicate with different groups as and when they wish? Who controls what you send out to your members and how often? Is it haphazard or is it managed so as not to send too many emails within a short period of time? Having one central database that can be managed and kept up-to-date across all departments and all areas of your activity is the ideal scenario and what you should be aiming to achieve. In the longterm, this will help not only in communicating with your members (customers) to provide a better service, but also to consider what else could be offered with the potential to drive new revenue to the organisation. Do not underestimate the value of your data think proactively about how you collect it, manage it and how you use it. Data management 1
Customer relationship management (CRM) is exactly what is says - managing your relationship with your customers i.e. your participants, your members (including volunteers, officials and coaches) and your fans. Your members, officials, volunteers, coaches, participants are all your customers Having a clear strategy to help you do this will have many benefits. It will: Allow you to focus on your customers Help you to learn about your customers and gain insights Help change attitudes and behaviours through good communication Increase potential revenue from customers through offering relevant opportunities, products and services Encourage new members through gaining of insights and understanding of existing members Improve your brand messaging and visibility through consistent formats Support existing, and future, sponsors who want to communicate with your participants Encourage new participants However, fundamental to a CRM strategy is the data at the centre of it and making sure it is in a format that is both useable and manageable. Today there are plenty of systems and software that can help you manage your data but first you need to be clear on: 1. What you want to do with it 2. What data you have 3. Where that data sits 4. How you manage the data Spend time considering these points and the rest of the process will work better for you. Firstly consider all the different areas where you collect data; 1. Look into the past - are there old databases of individuals that registered for something that were never followed up? Do you have a database of people who purchased tickets for events a few years ago? 2. Check you have email addresses for all your current members. Providing an email address should be a pre-requisite for application forms. If you don t have email addresses for some members, look at how you can incentivise people to provide them for example create a digital birthday card to come from one of your elite athletes. Data management 2
3. Look at what you do currently use and what information it holds. Do you have an online shop, are your coaches on a separate database to officials, does your newsletter get sent to a separate database to your clubs because you use a mailing house? Make a note of all the different areas of your organisation that hold data of any sort. 4. Think ahead about what are you likely to be doing in the future and make sure you ask for the right data from individuals in the first instance. Get their permissions if you want to contact them in certain way (see the Membership and Sponsors document for more information). You can do the above in-house with your own internal teams, or work with a specialist agency that can help you identify and understand all of these areas. They can also then help take you to the next step which is to integrate the data into one system and create a 'single customer view'. Many individuals involved in data will talk about the single customer view (SCV). A single customer view is defined as: An aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organisation about its customers. The advantage to an organisation of attaining this unified view comes from the ability it gives to analyse past behaviour in order to better target and personalise future customer interactions. A single customer view is also considered especially relevant where organisations engage with customers through multiple channels, since customers expect those interactions to reflect a consistent understanding of their history and preferences. Ideally you want to aim for: Creating a single customer view for each and every customer can only happen if all your data and information about them is integrated and stored as one consolidated record on your customer database. Think ahead to where and how you are registering new clubs, new members, officials and others. How can you simplify the process and work towards an integrated system? To deliver a SCV you will need to have the appropriate data management software and a means of integrating all your data. Either you will need to have in-house expertise that can do this or you will require the support of external agencies. Developing a SCV will enable you to start targeting your marketing communications accordingly and engage more effectively with your customers. Data management 3
Your members, coaches, officials and volunteers are the obvious source of data and information, however consider also other areas where you can obtain and capture data. Think about ticket purchasers for your events are they on a different register? Who attends courses, or have-a-go activities are they being registered anywhere? Do you have an online shop that anyone can access is this another separate database? Do you have a sign up opportunity for your newsletters or information from your website, YouTube channel etc? Consider all the different areas where and how you interact with people as this will be a good source. Whenever you run an event, no matter what the scale of it, consider how you can incentivise spectators to give you key data. Don t collect data for the sake of it. Make sure you have a plan of what you will do with it and how you will manage it once you have it. Once you have sorted all your data into a single customer view format you can then start to analyse it, You can look at who your members are, who your ticket purchasers are and even work out the average spend on online merchandise for participants living in Manchester (as an example!). A well integrated and user-friendly data system will allow you to gather useful information and feedback about your participants, your members, spectators and officials. This information can then be used to help attract commercial partners as you will have accurate information about who your participants are and what they are interested in. Sport England market segmentation (click here for the link, or Google: Sport England market segmentation ) will give you an idea of the type of people that play your sport indicating some general characteristics, where they predominantly live across England, etc. The research has been done with the general public through the Active People Survey (APS). Your own information can potentially give you even more insight into who your active participants and members are, i.e. your key customers. If you have a member database, you can send it to a specialist company that will Data management 4
use insight software such as Mosaic or Cameo to help you understand who your members are, where they live and what they look like providing useful demographics and psychographics. Psychographics is information about the characteristics of your members including age, income, education, occupation, household size, home ownership and home value, among other factors (demographics); Psychographic research also looks at people's lifestyles and behaviours, including their interests and values. Results from such analysis will be dependent on the quality of the data you provide, so be clear on what to expect from any software analysis. Another term often used is closed loop marketing. This is simply a means of using feedback from your customers in order to respond in the best way to provide a service or product for them. In the past, the only way to communicate with customers was by providing exactly the same information to everyone, in roughly the same way and at the same time using advertising grabbing your attention. Closed loop marketing, through use of specialist software, provides feedback which will enable you to understand your customer better so your communications to them can be more relevant and any advertising more targeted. Consider if it s a good idea to send information about a family ticket offer to the young people in your membership, or sending them information about discounts on a family car. Much better would be an offer for music or mobile phone apps. Achieving a well-structured and managed data system will provide a strong platform to be a better overall business operation in terms of efficiencies, operations and long-term potential revenue. Key aims and areas to consider are: Be customer-driven don t just push the same generic message to everyone Use intelligent customer insights that can drive revenues (through tickets sales, entry to events etc.) Capture data as a benefit and support to your sport and its growth Build systems to deliver a single integrated format i.e. systems that will talk to each other Aim for organisational-wide buy-in, not an IT driven project. Clever and careful management of data can benefit everyone Think about the future and ensure that systems are flexible wherever possible. Even if you have a small membership it is worth putting the systems and processes in place to allow you to grow and develop. By becoming a customer-centric organisation when you are small can only help you grow in the future. There are lots of great things you can read and listen to in order to learn more about this area- here are a few examples that could be useful: Econsultancy sends out free e-newsletters every day (www.econsultancy.com) Data management 5
Data IQ magazine helps you understand more about how this space and is usually free to subscribe (http://www.dataiq.co.uk/) Podcasts such as the Tao of Sports give an insight into how the US Sports market works (http://sportstao.com/) There are an increasing number of sports data agencies in the UK, the key is to select one which does not have a formal tie to a system provider (e.g. a ticketing or CRM system) but can work with each client on its own merits. Most importantly find out who they have worked with in the past and get some good recommendations of what they did and the effects of it. With so much data and tools to work with available, think carefully about what you want to achieve and how. A data/crm strategy should not be an IT function but a project that is core to your whole organisation with full support from all departments. Talk to experts who could potentially save you a lot of pain and anguish later through some simple actions and processes early on. Make data a central means to grow your sport and potentially drive new revenues. Data management 6