A Football Club Example 

Tim’s last post looked at research on the impact of embeddedness in online customer communities – which has prompted me to look at some of our client’s communities for examples.

The Australian Football League (AFL) stirs passions that probably only locals can really understand so when we had the opportunity to assist the AFL’s oldest Club to establish a member community – we knew we had some promising ingredients.

Melbourne Football Club is possibly the oldest professional sporting club in the world (please prove me wrong!!) and is celebrating its 150^th anniversary this year. The Club was keen to celebrate the anniversary in style and to use the milestone to achieve record membership numbers.

We had identified, in some customer segmentation and modelling work, a segment that we dubbed “passionate partisans” – representing people with both strong track record of membership and attendance at games. We also uncovered from focus group work that this group had a strong desire to engage more with the Club and to recruit other members.    

The Club’s membership last year stood at about 30,000 and so facilitating this “engagement” looked horribly like something that needed to be automated. We were able to do this with a technology platform sourced internationally.

Back to Tim’s post on embeddedness...

Members were invited by email to participate in an Advisory Panel to help shape the future of the Club and to assist in planning the Club’s 150^th Anniversary. The first three Panel surveys achieved between 20%&30% response rates.

The quality of the engagement was also impressive – to one open-ended question, the Club received over 1000 ideas – all progressively voted and ranked on by the community. 

The principles used in the Club’s communications to Panel members were:

• Recognition. We (the Club) have some ideas about xxx but we value your opinions as Advisory Panel members...
• Contribution. I (the Member) can contribute & will be seen to make a contribution by my peers. I am listened to and can make a difference – “bragging rights”. 
• Value. As an Advisory Panel member I am an “Insider” and will receive information before those outside of the Panel... 
• Feedback (Action!). We (the Club) have listened and here is what we have done or are doing about it.

The results for the Club have been some very quick insights. And as for the members? Melbournfc Marketing Manager - Jennifer Watt - says that members have been known to introduce themselves as "Advisory Panel Members" at Club events. Sounds a lot like embeddedness!