Case Study
Growing grassroots and community participation
Digital transformation and a strong strategy sets the stage for long term growth and participation within the AFL Grassroots and Community network.
Details
Company Name: Australian Football League (AFL)
Website: www.play.afl
The AFL had a vast network of applications and systems that served the Participation and Community network. These systems were disparate and difficult to maintain. Addressing these challenges, would provide the AFL with an opportunity to grow the participation base as well as to achieve additional revenue channels.
Getting to know the AFL
A unified and integrated technology stack would enable the AFL to provide a thriving community ecosystem
Challenge
The user experience for Participants was disjointed, with too many separate websites to access. This fragmented digital landscape also meant that the process for data collection and management was suboptimal.
Addressing these challenges with an overhaul of the existing technology environment, would provide the AFL with an opportunity to grow the participation base as well as to achieve additional revenue channels.
Solution
The AFL required a high-quality solution to empower internal teams to self-serve content updates without development cost, while providing a seamless user-experience. The Optimizely digital experience platform was selected to enable Content Management and the ability to incorporate multiple community websites, all while achieving data-driven confidence in the results. The new solution allowed the AFL to make use of data already existing within the network, as well as to efficiently collect data from outside the network.
Results
The new community platform creates centralised customer information, providing the AFL with intelligence that is crucial for future marketing efforts and community participation initiatives. The AFL has achieved measurable benefits across productivity, engagement and brand awareness for the community network. A summary of other gains include:
- Centralised, seamless solution
- Consolidation and upgrade of critical business systems
- Improvement in quality control and security
- Ability to aggregate, connect and activate analytics data in meaningful ways
- Robust analytics, data collection and integration
- Ability to create new content and micro-sites with ease
- Enhanced site performance & accessibility
- Reusable site features and components across the ecosystem
- Consistent branding and Customer Experience across channels
- Centralised location for AFL Club Help
- Enhanced club finder and search clubs to better allow users to register
- Ability to nurture and retain existing participants with an optimised user journey
- Long term growth within the Grassroots and Community ecosystem
%
INCREASE IN USERS to 3.3M
%
INCREASE IN UNIQUE VIEWS TO 2.6m
New Users
INCREASE IN PAGE/SESSIONS
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