When a youth sports organization faced a participation crisis, its one-person marketing department deployed martech to create a campaign raising awareness with key audience segments.
Who: NC Fusion is a nonprofit youth sports organization operating in the Greensboro–Winston-Salem–High Point (“Triad”) region of North Carolina. Its origins are in soccer, nevertheless it now runs field hockey and lacrosse programs as well.
“We imagine we will create intentional sports experiences that may change people for all times,” said Chris Barnhart, NC Fusion’s marketing director/department. “Any child or youth player who plays a team sport gets huge life lessons in all the pieces from how to work together to working with individuals with different backgrounds than you toward a typical goal. All those things we’d like in life. How to win, but in addition how to lose and the way to rejoice.”
What: Nationwide research has found that by age 14, girls drop out of sports at two times the speed of boys. The pandemic exacerbated the issue, with more Twelfth-grade girls dropping out of sports than every other group. NC Fusion needed to know if this was happening to them.
“Of course, we said, ‘Not us. No, we’re running a fantastic program,’” said Barnhart. “But nobody was satisfied with just opinion. So I began collecting all the info from all of our different sources. Using Microsoft Power BI, I accessed all those different data sources and brought them into one place.”
Data: Barnhart first checked out the age and variety of female players, compared them with the identical for boys and the way they modified over time.
“What we found is that on the age of 13, exactly on the national average, we start losing some girls and by the age of 17 we’ve lost half the girls,” he said. “You’re all the time gonna lose players, but losing them at that rate was not acceptable.”
For the organization, the decline struck at something rather more vital than how many individuals were using its services. While its goal is to create transformative sports experiences for all youth, those experiences are particularly vital for girls and young women.
According to The Women Sports Foundation:
- High school girls who play sports are less likely to be involved in an unintended pregnancy; more likely to recover grades in school and more likely to graduate than girls who don’t play sports.
- Girls and girls who play sports have higher levels of confidence and self-esteem and lower levels of depression.
- Girls and girls who play sports have a more positive body image and experience higher states of psychological well-being than girls and girls who don’t play sports.
And the impact lasts — 94% of female C-suite executives played sports once they were younger, 52% on the university level.
The tech: Barnhart got here to NC Fusion seven years ago after a protracted profession in health care. His children had undergone this system and the job appealed to him on many levels. When he got there the state of the technology was…interesting.
“What you might have to understand about youth clubs is that they were began by volunteers and run by volunteer coaches in the start,” he said. “So, when youth clubs construct up, they still have that form of volunteer, ‘Let’s piece things together’ form of mentality. Let’s keep it on the low-cost and, it’s just how it really works.”
Dig deeper: U.S. Soccer uses customer data platform to make marketing automation personal
He did a fast assessment and realized he had to get everyone on one platform. He selected Microsoft, got everyone on Outlook and immediately began Teams. “That was the 12 months before COVID, so we were perfectly positioned [when it hit],” he said.
With that done, he had to work out how to get all of the organization’s data in one place. This involved information from external web sites, registrations, player sheets, player reviews and more. Using data scraps and APIs, he was finally able to get all of it into Microsoft’s Azure Data Lake.
Audience research: NC Fusion’s first thought was that girls were leaving soccer for other sports. So they added lacrosse and field hockey. It quickly became clear that this wasn’t the answer. Then they began talking to former players.
“They were open with us and said, ‘It just didn’t feel right for me,’” Barnhart said. The reasons for that ranged from not feeling ok to their friends dropping out. “It made us slightly offended that we weren’t doing what we wanted to, to make them feel like this can be a home for them.”
The opportunity: Last 12 months the NC Fusion executive team realized the upcoming Women’s World Cup was perfect for getting their message out. To that end, they’ve begun producing a series of two-minute videos where an older, achieved woman wrote a letter to their younger selves about why sports helped them.
“We began by asking our own NC Fusion staff, which happens to have more females than men,” he said. “Sarah Bridges, our CXO, ‘Absolutely, I feel keen about this. I don’t mind talking on camera. I’ll be your first one out the gate.’”
The first video was released two weeks ago. Next up is an athletic trainer and beyond that will likely be a few of the staff who come from other countries. Barnhart can be on the lookout for women with careers that aren’t related to sports.
“One thing youth soccer does poorly in the United States is all of them have their path-to-pro pyramids,” said Barnhart. “Quite a lot of people have a look at that and say, ‘I’m not turning pro. Why am I doing this?’ So, what we’re pushing for now’s that skilled doesn’t mean necessarily soccer. Path-to-pro may very well be you turn into a health care provider or a small business owner. We’re trying to take our pyramid and never make it such a good point on the highest, but make it actually wider. That allows people to say yes, that is the way you make it to skilled levels.”
The campaign: NC Fusion is running 15-second teaser ads locally through the World Cup on broadcast and cable. It says that girls are dropping out and why. It has a QR code that brings people to a landing page with the complete video. They’re also using Microsoft Marketing to run an email campaign geared toward 30,000 parents saying that is why you need to be interested in this. For each ethical and legal reasons, they’re only targeting parents. Thanks to data sets they’ve access to, they’re able to goal parents who’ve female players between the age of 12 and 15.
“We can send a targeted message to those folks saying, ‘Your daughter is playing our sports, we all know that, but these are things that we wish you to keep in mind,’” he said. Barnhart limits the personalization of the emails to only using the family name.
“Something we’re coping with now with this Microsoft [AI-powered] Co-Pilot technology is having to sit down and say, ‘How far are we gonna push this? What are we willing to do and never do?’” he said. “with social media, we now not push anything to certain channels. Because a majority of our youngsters are under the age of 15 and we don’t want them on social media all of the day long. So we’re not pushing them to watch a skills video on youtube because we all know once they watch that they’re gonna be on it for the subsequent three hours like all of us do.”
The channels he does use are Facebook and Instagram, which appeals to an older demographic. They’ve moved all their videos from YouTube to Vimeo since it gives them control over what if any, other videos get suggested.
The emails are on a journey created in Microsoft that lets them goal the responses. “We have a look at who responded, who opened it, who didn’t open it,” Barnhart said. “We retarget the people who didn’t open it after several weeks with the follow-up and we just form of work our way down. But then when the brand new video comes out, we send out a refresher email and follow that very same journey of trends of opening, not opening, engaging, not engaging.”
The response: After every week they’ve had greater than 900 people watch the video. They’re tracking how far into the video people go “and overall, we have now 67% complete the entire video, which is pretty good for us.”
That’s really, really good for anyone.
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