BEST FAN ENGAGEMENT BY A CLUB
o Aston Villa Football Club
“What a video, what a club, get me back”, “goosebumps watching that”, “unreal content”, “if my face doesn’t entice you to buy a season ticket, I don’t know what will”. A true fan-led campaign, with our supporters becoming involved as the stars of our 21/22 Season Ticket campaign to truly remind everyone of what they’ve missed from ‘that Villa Park feeling’.
300+ fan videos were used to create an authentically unique Season Ticket campaign, resulting in excellent positive sentiment, a record-breaking launch day of sales, a record-breaking total sales period, and a record renewal rate. Set against a backdrop of major uncertainty and hesitancy at returning to major events due to the global pandemic, our fans helped to remind each other of the unique atmosphere you can only experience together at Villa Park.
o Fulham Football Club
The Club formed a working group with the Fulham Supporters’ Trust with the objective of holding a memorial fixture for those supporters who had passed away in recent times. This was particularly poignant following the pandemic, during which the Club sadly lost several longstanding fans and associates. Fulham’s home fixture against Huddersfield Town was dedicated to Celebration Day, with a special edition matchday programme produced as well as a big screen video montage which featured the names and images of all those we were honouring. Ahead of kick-off the two teams congregated for a period of applause, while wreaths from Club and Supporters’ Trust representatives were laid on the pitch. Feedback received from fans following the Celebration Day provided us with a clear sense of the impact this day left on supporters, with a reinforced connection of the Fulham Family.
o Leicester City Football Club
The Leicester City Supporter Engagement department aims to consistently deliver on connecting with supporters from all backgrounds and leads the Club’s efforts to support and involve its communities. We provide best-in-class, once-in-a-lifetime experiences to our existing fanbase, generate new audiences to support the Club’s growth and develop its reputation as a responsible force for good.
Heading into its first FA Cup final in 52 years in the spring of 2021, the Club had not played in front of its supporters since March 2020. Despite a significant number of supporters unable to be present for the final, the Club could not let this limit engagement with its fanbases and community pillars throughout the build-up, on the day of the occasion and after the result. LCFC’s Supporter Engagement department, subsequently, were tasked with enriching lives in the Club’s locale, using the ‘magic of the cup’ as inspiration throughout a period of significant spotlight.
o Norwich City Football Club
Here at Norwich City, we developed a brand-new fan engagement tool aimed at junior supporters to achieve our objective of growing our future fan base.
We identified we were struggling to engage with junior fans digitally, on a regular basis. We then looked specifically at our online junior presence, in which, at this time we just had a Junior Canaries page on our main club website which hosted information events as well as a couple of PDF colour-in sheets, receiving on average 200 unique page views per month.
From that research we created a plan to build a bespoke Junior Canaries website, including some key elements of functionality. Highlights of this included the ability for junior supports to log-in to their accounts and access exclusive areas, a variety of interactive games and quizzes, and regular competitions.
Since the launch of the website in December 2020, we have drastically grown our junior fan base and enhanced our digital engagement, amassing over 165,000 unique page views and over 50,000 unique users. In January 2022 alone, we reached over 2,500 users and over 7,000 unique pageviews, an increase of 6,800 on our original junior web pages before the launch of the website.
o Pafos Football Club
In recent years Pafos FC was looking for the ways to establish strong and close connections with the audience to become one unique community and develop together not only sports industry but also life quality for our fanbase, especially within the city of Paphos. We needed the support from our people. We started “Pafos FC Family” campaign the main aim of which was to bring as many official Club’s framed jerseys to local organizations, businesses and governing bodies as possible. Each time giving one frame we were not only including several people from that organization in Pafos FC Family by providing them a piece of ourselves but also setting up personal connections our audience needed the most. Currently almost all of our partners and friends received their jerseys: for last half of the year, we presented over 100 official framed jersey and still planning to bring around 50 more. At our last away game, we already brought not 4 fans but full bus of fans to support their Club in very important game against strong opponent. That is a great achievement to only for our Club, but also for the whole city that now has unifying power through Pafos FC.
o Wigan Athletic Football Club / Stadimax
The #BELIEVE FansFund is a first in English Football, a voluntary subscription-based initiative through which supporters can select from a variety of packages and choose where their funds are channelled towards, with 100% of all proceeds being directed into the Club’s Football Operations (i.e. First Team Operations, Youth Academy and High Performance & Sports Science). #BELIEVE FansFund Founders may choose to spread their financial support evenly across one, two or all three areas.
The #Believe FansFund is one of the first ever fan-engagment programmes which truly engages the entire fanbase, both ticket buying, game attending supporters and supporters across the globe. Every fan has the opportunity to directly make a genuine difference to the team’s performance on and off the pitch.
All football clubs have an endless menu of ideas, coaching programmes and team infrastructure that they would like to implement and the #Believe FansFund monies provide a means to fast-track these menu items to make the team stronger sooner. Fans have also benefitted from surprise Zoom calls, the opportunity to be in the 1st Team photo and all FansFund Founders names make up our 2022/23 Third Shirt.
