Sports CDP Crash Course - Data Talks Data Talks

Welcome to this week’s episode of our podcast, where we are thrilled to have Marisa Schlenker as our special guest. Marisa is a remarkable individual whose passion for community and its transformative power in the sports industry is truly inspiring.
In this episode, we dive deep into Marisa’s journey and explore her unwavering dedication to fostering a sense of belonging and unity within sports communities. With her extensive experience and expertise, Marisa sheds light on the pivotal role that community can play in bringing about real, tangible value and driving positive change within the sports world.
As we explore these topics and so much more, Marisa’s passion shines through, inspiring listeners to reflect on the power of community within the sports industry and beyond. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding how community-driven initiatives can bring about real change, foster meaningful connections, and create a more inclusive and vibrant sports environment.
Marisa Schlenker is a former professional football player with semi-professional and professional playing experience in Sweden, Spain, Germany, and the USA. With 10+ years of experience in the sport for the social development sector, she has worked on a variety of projects and initiatives which position sport as a contributor to sustainable development goals. As a monitoring, evaluation, and learning specialist she has worked with key players in the football for purpose, gender equality, and social activism space including Discover Football, EIR Ggwcup, FARE Network, Yunus Sports Hub, and Common Goal.
She is committed to doing her part as a football fan, coach, and player to do more and in an accelerated way around environmental and social sustainability and climate action. As a programme manager at Yunus Sports Hub, she gets to work with and learn from a dynamic and diverse group of young sports social entrepreneurs who are creating positive change in their local communities in and through sport.
Here are some links to sports for development resources:

1. Sportanddev platform: https://www.sportanddev.org/
2. GIZ Learning Hub: https://www.sport-for-development.com/learning-lab
3. IOC Young Leaders Learning Hub: https://olympics.com/ioc/sport-and-active-society/young-leaders/learning-hub
4. Women Win- The Learning Playground: https://playground.womenwin.org/
4. Bridging the Divide in Sport and Sustainable Development: https://www.iir.jpnsport.go.jp/en/sdgs/#page=1

Podcast art image credit: EUSA

We are thrilled to welcome Karen Ramirez as our guest host for this week’s episode, marking the beginning of her monthly updates on current affairs in the sports industry. As the founder of Sporting Sheroes, Karen brings a wealth of knowledge and experience, particularly in sponsorship development for women in sports.
In this episode, Karen shares her diverse background spanning various industries and her passion for helping athletes and teams find the right sponsors. She emphasizes the importance of economic empowerment at grassroots levels and the need for diversity in boardrooms and leadership positions. Karen expresses her excitement at having joined the Women in Sports: Beyond the hashtag community and reflects on the ways in which the community has positively influenced her journey, but also discusses the power of podcasts in driving change.
You are invited to actively participate in the podcast by suggesting burning topics or questions you want Karen to discuss. Together we can create a dynamic dialogue and drive positive change within the sports industry.
Join us as we embark on this exciting journey with Karen Ramirez, our dedicated and passionate guest host, providing valuable insights and updates from the ever-evolving world of sports.

Last week we organised a LinkedIn Live event to mark the launch of your eagerly awaited book, “More supporters. Superior sales. Real revenue: 4 Fundamentals of selling tickets and merchandise.
In case you missed it, we brought you this week´s special podcast episode, where you can listen to our Head of Communications and PR, Lorraine Moalosi, CEO and Founder Stefan Lavén, and Chief of Growth, Dionysios Zelios, discussing the key takeaways from the book and the key insights from the book, answering questions from viewers, and sharing their extensive experience in sports, tech, growth, and marketing.
Lorraine, Stefan and Dionysios joined forces to co-author the book to help all sports clubs sell more tickets and merchandise and negotiate sponsorship agreements of higher value.
“More supporters. Superior sales. Real revenue: 4 Fundamentals of selling tickets and merchandise” is now available in digital and print versions here. All proceeds from the book sales go directly to the LvelUp Foundation. This charity in Uganda uses football for child development, specifically focusing on girls. The Foundation provides girls with access to education, health care, and life skills training through football.

Whatever campaigns you run and however way you run them, you always want them to perform well. So whether you are sending out an email campaign for your latest limited edition jersey release or sending an SMS campaign reminding your previous season holders to renew their season tickets for your current season, the hope is always that you will achieve your goal. In order for you to understand the performance of any of your campaigns, you need to have some metrics you can measure.
In the first instance, the measurements that people think about are your typical delivery-rate, open-rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribes, bounces, and complaint rates. These are very good to know because they help you understand the relevance of your messaging because people only open emails they find relevant to them and only unsubscribe if they find what you are saying to be a nuisance more than helpful. Or maybe once again, it’s just simply because they find your messaging irrelevant. If you have too many bounces, that clearly indicates the quality of your supporter database. 

While these metrics are fantastic to know, you also want to know something even more important: the monetary performance of your campaign. You want to know the number of unique customers and total orders. But you also want to know the Daily breakdown of revenue per Campaign, the total revenue of each campaign, the Daily breakdown of Orders per Campaign, Top 10 Sold Products on Campaigns. But you also want to go deep and know things like Recency Supporter Status before Purchase, Frequency Supporter Status before Purchase, and Monetary Supporter Status before Purchase.

Okay, let’s break this down a little bit to give an in-depth understanding of how you can effectively measure campaign monetary performance. This is crucial because you want to identify the campaigns that bring in the most revenue and be able to keep doing it over and over again while increasing your revenue. Because that is the biggest goal: you want to bring your supporters’ average spending to as high a number as possible. That is the only way to increase revenue in a sustainable way. Let’s look at an example, shall we: 

You want to increase ticket sales for your last three games of the season. That’s your goal, so you send out an email campaign asking your supporters to celebrate the end of the season with you because there is no one better to celebrate with than your fans, right? Once you have sent this out, you will see a spike in ticket sales, but you want to understand which of your supporters responded and engaged the most with your campaign. So you would go into the Campaign Monetary Performance section in your analytics framework on the Data Talks Sports CDP. There you will find all the out-of-the box dashboards with in-depth metrics.

And from the dashboards, you will understand that:

200 of your supporters bought tickets
And a total of 1 000 tickets were bought by your supporters
You will notice that half of these purchases were made within the first couple of hours after you had sent out the campaign.

From your dashboards, you will get an understanding that the supporters who bought these tickets belong to your low-spenders segment and that the majority of them were idle and occasional supporters - those who purchase only when there is a special event (such as celebrating the end of the season). You will also be able to see the geographical location of these fans. In this instance, you would find out that the supporters in neighbouring towns would be the ones that are idle and occasional supporters and, therefore, would have been the ones to interact with your campaign.

From this one campaign, you would not only understand the monetary performance of your campaign, but you would also understand how to engage your idle and...

In this week’s episode, Lorraine sits down with Karen Ramirez, founder of Sporting Sheroes, an organization that champions women in sports. Karen’s mission is to see more female athletes achieve their full potential, both on and off the pitch.
Karen shares her journey of falling in love with sports and why she chose to work with a wide spectrum of ages, starting with grassroots, instead of focusing solely on elite athletes. She also reveals some of the most rewarding experiences she’s had so far.
Karen also discusses why the media should give women’s sports greater coverage and what changes within the industry have made her excited about the future of sports, especially for women. Additionally, she touches on why she believes sexism is one of the biggest issues of modern sports and what can be done to combat it.
Join us as we delve into the world of women’s sports and the incredible work Karen is doing with Sporting Sheroes. Don’t forget to follow Sporting Sheroes on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and reach out to Karen through LinkedIn. 
And if you’re looking to be a part of our fantastic Women in Sports community (which Karen is an active member of), be sure to join Women in Sports: Beyond the hashtag.

Clubs have many goals they need to achieve. Which is why it is important to have key performance indicators (KPIs). These let you know how you are performing against your goals. Are you reaching your goals, all the time or once in a while if at all? In episode 24 we discussed this very topic of KPI and we talked about what they are and why you need them. So this episode is a sequel to episode 24 but this time we will focus on the 5 KPIs all clubs should be focusing on. And in no particular order, these are; 1. Ticket sales 2. Merchandise sales 3. Matchday attendance 4. The value of your sponsorship agreements and finally number 5. The revenue you get from all of the other four KPIs. Let’s dive right in then shall we?
So ticket sales is the first KPI. And if you remember in episode 24 we said that your KPIs and goals should be smart meaning that they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. When setting ticket sales as a KPI, you want to be able to answer questions like how have our ticket sales been in a specific time period. And for all clubs the goal is to increase ticket sales or if you are always at full capacity a 100% of the time (which is impossible), you want to keep those numbers consistent. The reason you want ticket sales as a KPI is that this is the strongest indicator of your fans loyalty and the success of your ticketing campaigns have huge impact on your merchandise sales, sponsorship and matchday revenue.

The second KPI is merchandise. Merchandise sales are a good revenue source for any club so of course you want to ensure that you are increasing your merchandise sales. Once again, when tracking this you have to make sure that you have specific goals for a specific period so that you can measure the effectiveness of your merchandise sales.

Just because people are buying tickets to your games does not mean that they end up attending the game. No-shows are such a common occurrence in sports that clubs have had to be innovative to tackle this issue. A great example of this is FC Midtjylland who adopted a subscription based ticketing model to discourage no shows. Listen to the discussion that our CEO and Founder Stefan Lavén had with the ticketing manager of FC Midtjylland Martin Jacobsen in episode 49 of the podcast. Matchday attendance is a KPI that you need to keep a close eye on so that you make sure that your stadium is as full as possible.

Number 4, you need to keep an eye on the value of your sponsorship agreements. Have your agreements been growing in value in the past two years or so? Which sponsorship have proven to have the highest engagement and/or return on investment in the last 5 years? Which potential sponsors do your supporters have a strong affinity and interest in and how would that possibly impact your sponsorship value in the next 5 years? There are so many KPIs you can track so do it. Track the value of your sponsorship agreements.

Last but not least is revenue. Has your revenue increased or decreased in the past season? Are you forecasting it to grow in the future or decrease? How much of your revenue comes from your ticket sales, merchandise sales, matchday purchases and sponsorship agreements? And are all categories...