Reaching 3.6 million football fans via comprehensive customer engagement

KNVB relies on SAS Customer Intelligence 360 to tailor outreach and deepen connections with millions of Dutch football enthusiasts

When it comes to team sports, football reigns supreme in the Netherlands. With 1.2 million members, the Royal Dutch Football Association – KNVB – is the biggest sports organization in the country, overseeing professional and amateur leagues and the Dutch men’s and women’s national teams.

There are 3,150 football clubs in the Netherlands, and every member of every football club is registered in a database. No other sports federation in Europe has a database as extensive and complete.

All the Dutch football clubs provide input to the database, which has 3.6 million unique records, representing 21% of the total Dutch population.

This means there’s an enormous amount of data to generate insights from. And KNVB puts it to good use with SAS Customer Intelligence 360.

“We are known for our innovative approach to engage our fans and our members in a fun and personal way,” says Dave Dekker, Chief Commercial Officer at KNVB. “The main goals of KNVB are improving football in the Netherlands and increasing our fan engagement. Data and technology allow us to take proactive steps toward these goals.”

A comprehensive customer engagement platform

KNVB established five key objectives it wanted to achieve:

1. Gain more insights into the motives of football players, fans and volunteers.

2. Share these insights with the thousands of football clubs across the Netherlands.

3. Make better data-driven marketing decisions and set up personalized customer journeys.

4. Optimize commercial opportunities for KNVB and its partners.

5. Become a data-driven organization that promotes the love of the game.

“Our strategy is KPI-driven, meaning that we have clear objectives and measurable elements,” Dekker says.

With SAS, KNVB set up a complete customer engagement platform with the following components:

• Customer Intelligence KNVB System (CIKS): The CIKS is an opt-in database that includes the member administration of all 3,000 amateur football clubs. Data from third-party sources – such as game data, ticket sales, merchandise sales, website visits and mobile apps – are added as well. Data quality and the adherence to strict privacy rules are essential in the automated extract, transform and load processes. The CIKS contains 2.5 million unique profiles and is mainly used to generate additional commercial opportunities.
• SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and SAS Visual Analytics: These solutions are used for campaign management and advanced analysis. The primary channels include email, mobile apps and the website.
• Voetbal Intelligence Platform (VIP): The VIP builds on the CIKS database and includes extra data sources and more profile information, such as research results and demographic data. The VIP is used mainly to gain new insights into the behaviors of members, fans and volunteers.
• Football ecosystem: This ecosystem – a combination of the above solutions and systems – grants access to other football clubs, helping them make data-driven decisions.

Reaching the right audience with the right message

With SAS Customer Intelligence 360 in place, KNVB is better positioned to promote football through a deeper understanding of its audiences.

Segmentation of active players, clubs, fans and volunteers is now fully data-driven, and done with more precision and at scale. Additionally, communications are more personalized. By adjusting the tone of voice and channel selection in combination with tailored forecasting and communication campaigns, the activities of KNVB and its commercial partners are more profitable and efficient.

“SAS Customer Intelligence 360 helps us to really engage with different groups of football lovers within our community, especially fans,” says Rick Koetsier, Lead Data Intelligence at KNVB. “We were able to connect with them on the individual level. SAS Viya plays a critical role, enabling us to daily analyze and visualize the KPIs from the strategic plan.”

Using SAS, KNVB took different steps to improve football. Some examples:

• Encourage more women to play football.
• Re-engage inactive players and motivate them to return to the sport.
• Implement strategies to attract more fans to attend football matches.
• Ensure grassroots football teams are properly grouped for more equal and balanced competitions.

“The number of people using the platform continues to broaden,” says Marion Massop, Marketing Intelligence Manager at KNVB. “The marketing department – supported by the data intelligence department – is responsible for a single customer view. It’s our job to facilitate the access to the data for as many stakeholders as possible. We’re lucky to have data-savvy marketers who are able to clearly communicate the advantages of customer engagement to the rest of the organization and our partners.”

Connecting with 1.4 million amateur players and fans

As a subsidiary of KNVB, Voetbalmedia runs the amateur football platform voetbal.nl. More than 1.4 million users engage with its website and mobile app, including players, coaches, referees and fans.

“Based on all the data and insights that SAS gives us, we are able to provide a better user experience to everyone,” says Felix van der Kooi, Director of Voetbalmedia. “The newly developed personal dashboard makes it possible for every player to track his or her performance and personal statistics, as well as team statistics. This makes it much more enjoyable, not only watching programs and results, but it deepens the experience as a football player.”

Questions answered, insights uncovered

Analytics empowers KNVB to find meaningful patterns in its data and uncover new knowledge that it can act on. For instance, here are three questions the football federation investigated with SAS:

Why do football players often stop playing?
Football players often stop playing due to a lack of tight team integration and alignment. Data revealed that teams with less churn and higher retention rates are the best guarantee to keep players motivated longer.

What is the best way to predict – and boost – ticket sales?
KNVB now predicts ticket sales for the games of the Dutch national team by looking at past sales and closely monitoring current sales evolutions. As such, the organization can put in additional campaigns if needed to further boost sales.

Is KNVB connecting with a diverse audience?
KNVB connects with a diverse audience, serving everyone from fans of the national teams, grassroots players, trainer-coaches, referees to all the football enthusiasts who use the digital platforms, KNVB serves a wide range of stakeholders. As football is the No. 1 sport in the Netherlands, it is a reflection of the society. The association’s impact reflects the rich diversity of the Dutch population. By leveraging insights from data, KNVB can continuously cater to various groups, fostering inclusivity and strengthening the football community.

KNVB is excited with the results it has seen, and the football federation is looking forward to future discoveries with analytics. “Next on our wish list is to integrate social behaviors into our single customer view,” Massop says.

“The choice of SAS for our customer engagement platform was an obvious one,” Massop concludes. “When it comes to analytics, you won’t find anything with better performance in the market than SAS. Adding Customer Intelligence 360 to our platform made it even more interesting for us. The opportunity we had to establish a real partnership with SAS enabled us to make big strides forward, fast. As a sports federation, we believe solid partnerships create a true win-win.”