In our first quarterly customer forum of 2022, our new Hookit colleague shared exciting product updates, the Boston Celtics showed us how they’re using Helix to improve fan engagement, and our team revealed new and upcoming product updates. If you didn’t get a chance to join us or just want to review a specific update, check out our recap below.

Recent & Upcoming Hookit Enhancements by RJ Kraus, Chief Product Officer at Hookit

Data Share: Integrate Hookit data into your world 

Data Share makes data accessible. It lets you get the most out of your Hookit data by adding it into your existing insights pipeline and mixing it with your first party data to identify actionable insights that drive business impact. Ways you can access your Hookit data include:

• KORE platform (coming soon)
• Hookit Platform
• Snowflake account or a reader account within the Hookit instance
• Your BI Tool via native data connectors in 50+ platforms

Automated Tagging: Make your data more usable

Automated Tagging is a rules-based system to organize your content so you can focus on delivering reports, analysis, and insights faster. Tag events, content series, campaigns, sponsorship activations, products, and more.

Are you still waiting on end-of-year recaps 6 weeks after the season ended?

Through our work with brands, rights holders, and agencies, we noticed a theme, partnership recaps take FOREVER – forever to produce and forever to receive. Then, once you finally do receive it – usually 4 to 8 weeks later – it’s a fluffy PDF or PowerPoint. It’s fluffy because tracking down all the data needed to provide a thorough analysis is time consuming and tying results back to actual partnership objectives is a manual process.  

You need more evaluation and insights and less fluff, though. You need to know how a partnership performed against the objectives set, how partnerships compare, and if your entire portfolio is performing well. Most important of all, you need to know if your partnership investments are contributing toward business goals.

Understanding the market’s needs, we developed a tool in our Evaluate product that allows every partner to submit essential performance data at any time. The timely collection of data that matters most to your organization reduces the wait time for recaps. It also feeds into reports that give you insights to how underlying metrics performed in striving to meet objectives. With better reporting and insights throughout the season, you can make impactful performance-based investment decisions.

The Data Submission Portal Unifies Performance Data

The new Data Submission portal tool in Evaluate lets your data providers (e.g., partners and agencies) submit files through a customized web-based portal. The customized portal is a secure way for data providers to submit the performance data needed to evaluate your partnerships. The portal also establishes a system for data providers to submit quantitative and qualitative metrics as soon as they’re available.

To start, a data provider logs into your Data Submission Portal and selects an account. Once they select an account, the submitter is given a list of form options based on the type of data they are submitting.  Based on the form selected, the submitter downloads the corresponding .CSV template, which includes instructions to complete the form structure for submission.

Then, the submitter populates the .CSV template and uploads it back into the portal for ingestion. The .CSV template takes the data and standardizes it into a format that aligns with your data warehouse. After it’s uploaded, you, the data recipient, can review or decline the data before it’s appended to your data warehouse and visualized via Tableau dashboards for near-time insight into how that partnership’s objectives are tracking.

In the example above, a data provider logs into the brand’s portal to upload the latest hospitality event metrics for a specific account using the Hospitality: Guest Management System form. Once the submitted data is approved by the reviewer (e.g., the brand), it’s visualized via Tableau dashboards for near-time insight into how hospitality metrics are tracking for this specific account. 

What our customers love about the Data Submission Portal include:

• Customizable portal to match your brand’s look and feel
• Unique forms based on your business objectives (e.g., hospitality, customer acquisition, social media, media valuation)
• Data validation upon upload so accurate metrics are always submitted
• Reduced waiting time on data availability
• Data-focused results and reduction in recap noise

Performance-led Decisions & Optimized Partnerships with Near-Time Insights

The Data Submission Portal makes data centralization quicker by unifying it directly from data providers and integrations. Plus, you can breathe easy knowing all data submissions are subject to KORE’s rigorous QC and data validation process.

Uploading partnership metrics any time via the portal also increases the availability and frequency of reporting so you don’t have to wait weeks for insights. Dashboards are updated in near time when new information is added, providing up-to-date results and benchmarking. You can also provide Tableau dashboard access to individual partners so you both track deal progress and collaborate on optimizing your partnership. For example, if you notice a partner is going to fall short reaching their impressions objective you can quickly reach out to activate or pivot in real time. Without this visibility, you wouldn’t have known this social objective was falling behind and couldn’t work to correct it until it was too late.

Partnership Overview Dashboard Showing Impressions per Week

Another use case common with our customers is evaluating consumer value growth. For instance, if you have a partnership with a football team and this past November you did a military appreciation push with them, you may want to know how the event impacted in-venue sign ups of your services. Access to this type of insight allows for quick pivoting of what’s not working and continuing what is.

The Data Submission Portal in Evaluate ensures transparency between data providers and partners, which is key to making informed investment decisions. It also leads to timely reporting and true collaboration. Best of all, transparency fosters more successful partnerships because both sides have proof that they’re getting value from the relationship.

Consumer Value Growth Dashboard Showing Impact of Partnership on In-Venue Sign Ups

Interested in learning more about the Partnership Portal and how Evaluate can show you your whole partnership story? Request a 30-min demo here.

Last year, we shared the rebranding of KONNECT to Activate. Activate is a best-in-class activation platform that improves partner relationships by modernizing the way you track deals and collaborate with partners.

With Activate, you can focus on strategy by simplifying the way you manage partnerships. Activate allows you to automate how you track asset delivery, goal progress, and performance metrics, while getting more time back to focus on strategy and improve value to partners. Our activation platform also helps enrich your partnerships and drive better results with real-time metrics and insights that simplify sharing performance recaps with your partners. Additionally, Activate drives sponsorship revenue growth. It allows you to track asset performance to proactively reevaluate rate cards and maximize returns. Easily prove value to partners to drive renewals, upsells, and sponsorship revenue.

To continue providing the industry’s leading activation platform, we made significant product upgrades and added new features. Now, it’s easier than ever to manage all your partnership details – like budget, assets, objectives, and performance – in one user-friendly platform.

Objectives & Key Results (OKR) Feature Enhancements
Brands and rights holders enter partnerships to achieve measurable business objectives. Too often, those objectives are untracked while all the focus is on meeting the deal’s contractual terms. With Activate’s Objectives feature, you can capture those goals at the beginning of a partnership and use key results to measure progress throughout the season. Common partnership objectives include increases in overall sales, new product sales, and increasing brand awareness. Tracking progress provides insight into whether your partner is getting what they want out of the deal—and if they aren’t, you can proactively re-evaluate and adjust the strategy. Focusing on the real objectives leads to stronger and longer-lasting partnerships.

To improve this OKR feature, we updated the user interface and capabilities. Users can now manage OKRs on a full-page slider, rather than a pop-up, for a complete view of each OKR. For better navigation, customize and view the objective name on the side panel. You can also add more objectives and key results to each deal. 

New OKR Interface

 Way Too Many Sponsorship Applications in Your Email 

We’ve heard the horror stories. Email inboxes inundated with hundreds of sponsorship requests – 90-99% of which are denied. That’s a lot of noise. Accepting submissions via email, though, is highly inefficient because…well, when is email ever the most efficient way to ingest or visualize anything?    

Right now, most brands and agencies manually review each submission to determine next season’s sponsors, which is time consuming and ultimately means inconsistencies or missed opportunities. 

 Intake’s NEW Scoring, Weighting, & Reporting Features

Through our work with brands, we’ve discovered that only about 10% of applications submitted move to the next stage in the selection process. Intake’s new scoring and weighting features help identify that 10% more easily. 

The new features automate the process of weighting questions and answers to calculate a final score. With scored applications, it’s easy to compare opportunities and highlight the best matching ones that align with business strategy and objectives.  

• Scoring & Weighting Configuration: Intake provides a decision-making framework and a user-friendly interface to self-configure a weighting system used to score each application.  

To assemble a winning partnership portfolio, brands must first choose the right partners. The right partners help to achieve key business objectives, improving both partnership and portfolio returns. However, all brands have distinct goals so knowing what to look for in a partner can be a challenge. Without the right tools or processes in place, you’ll spend valuable time and effort sifting through hundreds of applications for the perfect fit and still, it’s not a guarantee that you’ll identify the right ones.     

So how do you accurately recognize effective partners faster while doing less grunt work? We’re sharing the four essential steps to selecting the right partners for helping your brand reach its unique objectives.

1. Identify Your Business Objectives & Ask the Right Questions

Every organization has different business objectives. From our work with global brands, some of the more common ones we’ve seen are societal impact, customer engagement, and revenue lift. Identifying your business objectives allows you to ask the right questions in your sponsorship application and determine if a potential partner is a good fit. For example, if your brand’s goal is to increase high-end customer growth, then you’d ask questions about audience demographics to uncover opportunities that help reach that target market. Asking strategic questions at the beginning of your evaluation process eliminates the gut-feel decision making that often plagues new partnership selection.   

2. Define Your Scoring Criteria

With strategic application questions in place, assign weights based on your brand’s priorities. Perhaps your top focus is brand exposure, then you’d assign more weight to questions related to increasing reach. After an applicant responds, their request is scored based on what you’re trying to achieve. Now, reviewing hundreds, even thousands, of applications is no longer a time-consuming task because the high-scoring opportunities are highlighted.

Assigning weights to questions and intentionally scoring applications also provides the capability to evaluate different types of opportunities. For example, if you receive an application from an esports organization for the first time, applying weights allows you to compare it to more traditional sponsorships like a sports team.  Having the ability to compare apples-to-apples, even between diverse opportunities, eliminates the guess work behind choosing partnerships and demonstrates your selection is based on data.  

3. Develop A User-Friendly Interface

Once you’ve created your custom application, it needs to live somewhere accessible for both applicants and internal reviewers. Instead of accepting submissions via email, text, carrier pigeon, etc., set up a branded submission portal to direct future partners and clearly state your brand’s expectations. Luckily, KORE’s Intake solution can help with this. Intake is an application management portal built to host your application, accept requests, and streamline your entire sponsorship selection process.  

Further, having a tailored portal like Intake prevents submissions from getting buried in personal work emails. It centralizes every request and gives internal reviewers a dedicated place to evaluate and approve applications.

Using a branded platform provides a consistent user experience and an efficient process for both external applicants and internal employees.

4. Establish A Review & Approval Process

Now that you have a branded platform to host your application, set up the software to automatically score, assign reviewers, and send approval/deny responses. Intake’s technology includes the capability to set up custom weighting and scoring, designate reviewers, and provide status emails to applicants.

User-friendly tools and a unified process allows you to instantly bring to light and act on the best sponsorship opportunities. Additionally, eliminating the manual elements of reviewing every application saves you time and effort that you could spend improving your portfolio strategy and partner relationships.

Need help developing a sponsorship application process to find the right partners? KORE Intake can help. Request a 30-min demo here.

2021 was a big year for KORE – not only for our team, but for you and the hundreds of global sports organizations, brands, and properties that trust our intelligence platform to enhance fan engagement, manage sponsorships, and drive performance across their entire event activation landscape. Thank you for being on this journey with us and for being part of this incredible community of industry leaders.

As we close out this year, we wanted to celebrate with a recap of our favorite products and features, and a glass of champagne. Cheers to a prosperous and a data-rich new year!

Best wishes & warmest regards,
The KORE Team

That New New

We did our best to understand the assignment in 2021 and launched new products and features to support you throughout the entire engagement marketing lifecycle. Building off our prior KONNECT platform, we created a comprehensive three-product suite—Intake, Activate, and Evaluate— to help find the right partners for your business, deliver proof of performance, and easily compare partnerships across your entire portfolio. Now, with our unique intelligence platform and global benchmark data, you can replace “gut feel” decisions with truly informed engagements.

Intake

Intake is all about helping you find the right partners for your business, faster. With an endless number of sponsorship opportunities to choose from, it’s often challenging to find the right ones. So, how do you filter the “good” vs. “bad” opportunities? With a streamlined application management system like Intake, it’s easy to filter, score, and approve partnership requests based on your unique business needs.

The secret sauce of this product is its ability to score and weigh sponsorship requests (minute 16:55). In the first version of this feature that we launched this year, you assign a weight to questions and answers received via your organizations’ customized application form. If the total score of a submission is lower than your defined threshold, it is automatically declined. Score thresholds and automated responses, like a decline email, are configurable per form. Seamlessly filtering out requests that do not align with your business’ objectives reduces the noise and manual process of reviewing each individual opportunity. Stay tuned for optimizations to scoring and weighting coming in Q1 2022, as well as potential other interesting use cases for request & approval management within the platform

Activate

Activate, formerly KONNECT, is a best-in-class partnership management system. Need a way to manage all your partnership details like assets, deliverables, objectives, and performance – all in one place? Activate modernizes the way you track deals and collaborate with partners, so you know what is performing well, have more time to focus on strategy, and drive better results overall.

Check out the cool new features we added to Activate this year:

• The two new Advanced Delivery features – flexible quantities and channels- make it easier to capture the true delivery of each asset. By tracking deals as they are delivered instead of how they were contracted, you save time and effort pulling proof-of-performance reports, create alignment between internal teams and partners, and leave more time for strategic planning & execution. In addition to new features, we don’t forget about the existing ones, such as reporting. There was an average 80% decrease in report load times, saving teams time and effort!
• To complement our Evaluate product, the Deal Tableau Connection allows you to connect your Tableau workbooks to your individual sponsorships. This allows you to surface visually pleasing partner scorecards and performance insights directly within KORE deal sheets.  By leveraging Tableau, we can improve partner engagement and communicate a data-driven story in a more streamlined fashion without the typical overhead of periodic partner recaps. Inviting partners into the platform also provides live access to their own impressions, media value, and performance metrics throughout the season.
• A simple, yet effective, piece of functionality we significantly improved in 2021 is our Objectives and Key Results (OKR) functionality in Activate (minute 9:35). OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and drive engagement around measurable goals. In a “post-pandemic” world, there is a growing trend of cost justification from partners and greater scrutiny of money spent on deals. OKRs create measurable goals which you and your partners can look back on to better understand how effective the deal was, justify spend, and leverage during renewal conversations.

Evaluate

Evaluate provides in-depth partnership analysis. It’s a sophisticated evaluation system that uses a unique measurement framework to weigh and compare sponsorship performance against measurable goals and benchmarks. When you know what’s working well, it’s easy to maximize value and make performance-based sponsorship decisions. This includes the ability to easily centralize disparate data sets and map them against a trusted and consistent measurement framework built to inform the health of your partnership ecosystem.

In the second half of this year, we added the Data Submission Portal to Evaluate. The portal makes it seamless to gather performance data from every partner and source. Your data providers submit files through a customized web-based portal, feeding instantaneously into your Tableau dashboards, giving a near-time perspective on how your objectives are tracking.

All the New Integrations

In 2021, we added 19 new data integrations to the KORE data ecosystem:

Some of our favorites were Shopify, Square, Alchemer, and a variety of sports league feeds.

• Shopify – Shopify is an e-commerce point of sales solution used by many organizations in the sports and entertainment industry. KORE’s Shopify integration provides the ability for KORE clients to ingest sales transactions, items sold, and customer information into their data warehouse. What makes this integration one of our favorites in 2021 is that it’s our first point-of-sale (POS) integration which includes abandoned basket details so you can track customers who are interested in purchasing but have not yet pulled the trigger.
• Square – Square is a point-of-sales, non-e-commerce solution. KORE’s new Square integration includes rich data sets around retail transactions, items sold, and personal identification information. What puts Square on our favorite’s list is the robust customer-level details it provides. This allows for data to be connected to your golden record for more comprehensive fan profiling.
• Alchemer – Alchemer is a survey platform which formally went by the name Survey Gizmo. KORE is excited to provide new integrations to ingest detail rich survey response data into your warehouse. Customers are using survey data within DWA for fan sentiment analysis, event recaps, and corporate sponsorship analysis, and many other use cases.
• Sports League Feeds (NFL and MLB) – Expanding and improving the access to league provided data has been a big focus for the KORE integration team in 2021. Over the past year, we have added numerous data sets to the NFL & MLB league feeds which provide rich customer-level data for demographics, e-commerce transactions, and marketing engagements

Ticketing Integrations

For our Sports & Entertainment clients, we added two new ticketing integrations this year – Paciolan and Ticketek.  These two additions sit alongside our existing catalog of best-in-class ticketing integrations with Ticketmaster, Tickets.com, SeatGeek, and AXS.

Not only have we added to our catalog of integrations, but we also focused on improving the existing integration sources.  We began ingesting Ticketmaster ticket exchange data that flows back into DWA at 15-minute intervals. Prior to this enhancement, secondary market data was being ingested only once every hour. Now, with near real-time ticket exchange data, we can be more confident on who is truly entering the building during gamedays. This leads to more dynamic fan experiences through improved interactions, personalization, and provides a better pulse on gameday versus a retrospective approach.

Making Fan Engagement ‘Beta’ with Helix

Earlier in the year, we introduced a brand-new product that KORE has been deeply focused on over the past 12 months – Helix.  Helix represents a significant step forward in KORE’s ability to drive increased fan retention and campaign conversion through enhanced personalization at each touchpoint within the fan journey. The new Helix features are:

• Identity Resolution: Configurable rules to identify & match fans across disparate platforms.
• Golden Records: A consolidated “best” representation of each fan.
• Fan DNA: Clear understanding of why a Golden Record was created & which source accounts it’s linked to.
• Tags, Attributes, Categories, Timeline: Auto-apply tags, calculate attributes, and better understand how your fans behave over time.
• Audience Builder: Segmentation tool for non-technical users.

So, what do all these features mean for you? They mean Helix improves fan de-duplication processes, so your teams cast a wider and more focused net on who to target for sales and marketing efforts. It introduces tooling to allow non-technical marketing users to work with fan data and powers true automation in CRM and marketing tools by supplying better and deeper data sets to those systems.

In the second half of this year, we launched our first Helix Beta program with a group of early adopters and we couldn’t be more excited about the early results we’re seeing from this program.  Coming in the first half of 2022, we’re looking forward to the full Helix release. Stay tuned for more news, feature information, and customer success stories in the new year.

Curious how a Beta program participant is using Helix? Watch Chris Zeppenfeld of the Charlotte Hornets share how he’s using Helix to empower his team to drive targeted and personalized fan journeys (minute 42:40). For a demo of Helix, tune into our Q2 Customer Forum recording (minute 42:45).

Salesforce Independent Software Vendor (ISV)

Another highlight for KORE in 2021 was launching our KORE App on Salesforce AppExchange. Now, you can integrate your ticketing and sponsorship platform with Salesforce to ensure ticket purchases, deal management, and customer data are available for end-users without ever leaving the Salesforce environment. Read the full blog from earlier this year.

KORE Data Model for Retail & Merchandise

We shared our new KORE Retail and Merchandise data model in our Q1 Customer Forum (minute 34:37) earlier this year. We developed the data model to address three common challenges we realized data warehouse users were experiencing:

1. High technical barrier of entry to capture, report, and analyze data to answer business questions.
2. Vendor data is often not optimized for reporting and analytics.
3. Data blending is challenging when changing vendors and/or using multiple vendors.

The new KORE data model normalizes and standardizes data across different retail and merchandise vendors, like Appetize, Fanatics, and Vend. It then augments that data with additional context, like game date, opponent, and result information from your organization. This enriched data and the ability to slice and dice it, helps answer important business questions, like do we sell more on weekend or weeknight game days, do we sell more against our rivals or conference opponents, and do we sell more during wins or loses? With the ability to conduct comprehensive, more efficient analysis and reporting, it’s easier to answer your key questions to help optimize your business.

New Sponsorship Reporting Suite

At the end of Q1, we rolled out 33 new Sponsorship reports accessible through the Tableau environment. The reports were rebuilt from the ground up to replace the standard reports previously in our Sponsorship product. The goals for rebuilding these reports were:

1. Improve report performance by rebuilding and optimizing queries.
2. Enhance user interface of reports by:
   • Reorganized all the existing filters into the filter icon at the top right of the report. Previously, all the filters were listed which took up too much space in the report.
   • Adding the information icon at the top right of the report to provide supporting information to understand report terms and the data you’re interacting with.
3. Provide more meaningful insights by improving how data is presented.

Watch our Q1 Customer Forum recording (minute 7:12) to learn more about these 33 new reports.

For more information about any of these products or features, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. Not a KORE customer? Request a 1-hour product demo here.

As we continue to revolutionize sponsorship recaps, we added the ability to connect your Tableau workbooks to your individual sponsorships in Activate. Connecting to Tableau improves partner engagement by making it easy for your partners to access reporting and recaps. Inviting partners into the platform also provides live access to their own impressions, media value, and performance metrics throughout the season.

Prior to the Tableau connection, external partners couldn’t view reports on their own. Reports were manually sent which was time-consuming and prevented true partner collaboration. 

Syncing your Tableau workbook that’s within our Tableau server to each deal enables a new “Insights” tab with reports that partners can access anytime. Since your Sponsorship team is already working to manage and track activations, this new feature makes it seamless to surface the information to each partner.

A sports and entertainment company recently started using this feature with more than 10 of its partners. Each of them was provided with their own portal to view the progress and performance of their assets. Providing transparency into real-time results helped increase overall partner engagement and satisfaction.

CONNECTING TABLEAU TO DEALS

REPORTS AVAILABLE FOR PARTNERS TO VIEW 

Already have Activate and a Tableau server with us? Contact your Customer Success Manager to start using this new feature today. If you’d like to learn more, request a free 1-hour demo here.

If creating sponsorship recaps takes you countless hours, keep reading.

The four new Advanced Delivery features in Activate make it easier to capture the true delivery of each asset. By tracking deals as they are delivered, you save time and effort pulling recaps, create alignment between internal teams and partners, and leave more time to identify new sales opportunities.

The Challenge: Representing the Deal as it is Delivered
Often what is sold in a sponsorship deal is not exactly what ends up being delivered. It is common for delivery details to be determined later or for multiple unplanned deliveries to happen per event. These unplanned deliveries do not include “make goods” or “bonuses”, which are already included in our system, but rather they are the extras that naturally occur when activating an asset.

For instance, a single digital campaign asset may be sold but can turn into 20+ deliveries if the details are not specified during contracting. Now it is time to deliver, and you are stuck manually tracking those 20+ unaccounted deliveries in a spreadsheet, limiting visibility for partners and internal teams. However, imagine if you had a system that turned your manual process into a few easy clicks. With every detail of each delivery – planned or not – in one system, you can create partner alignment and pull sponsorship recaps in less time.

CLIENT SPREADSHEET EXAMPLE (before)

ACTIVATE SYSTEM (after)

The Solution: Flexible New Features & Benefits
The new Advanced Delivery features make it easier to ensure partners have detailed proof-of-performance on each asset, details of how and when it was used, which channels it ran on, and how they ultimately performed.

• (A) Flexible Quantities: Unlink from the contracted quantity and add/remove as many deliveries as you need. Additionally, you can tie multiple records to the same event. Document the contracted quantity, while also having the flexibility to tell the whole story of what was delivered and create sponsorship recaps faster at the end of each season.
• (B) Channels: Label a record to better understand and track “where” it was delivered. For instance, was it on Facebook, Twitter, or a player appearance? These metrics are important data points to report so you understand what is working and proactively adjust what is not.
• (C) Campaigns*:  Create campaigns and group related assets to accurately track which deal they belong to and easily provide detailed, partner-ready recap reports. 
• (D) Performance Metrics*: Log impressions, engagement, and metrics for performance insights, fast. Get real-time analytics to actively adjust strategy and maximize partnership value.

*Features will be available Q4 2021.

Start Simplifying Your Sponsorship Recaps Today
Already have Activate? Awesome! Contact your Customer Success Manager to learn more and start using these new features today. If your organization does not have Activate and you want to see these features in action, request a free 1-hour demo here.

Overview 
Like many professional sports teams, the Dallas Stars needed a way to manage social content, track metrics, and publish sponsorship recaps for multiple partners. With the NHL playoffs around the corner and the pandemic limiting venue attendance, the Dallas Stars began replacing their in-game partnership activations with increased social media content. After creating a social strategy and leveraging KORE’s DWA social integrations, the team was able to collect social data and pull partner recaps faster, leaving more time to improve partnership performance and value.

Key Outcomes
Data collection for all partners reduced from 39 hours to only 2 hours—a 93% improvement.
Turnaround time for creating all partner recaps reduced from 24-48 hours to just 1 hour.
More time to communicate and strategize with partners, improving partnership performance and value.

“KORE has completely changed the way our team manages our corporate partners and their assets by providing us with efficient and reliable functions though their DWA social integrations. The ability to pull metrics and reports from KORE has saved tremendous time and efforts from our Marketing team; it is hard to believe we tried to function without this system before. KORE has quickly become a cornerstone of how we do business.” – Colette Rushing, Activation Director, Corporate Partnerships

Challenge
Social media data was scattered, inconsistent, and time consuming to collect and report for every partner. Additionally, the increase in social assets during the pandemic made it even more challenging to manage all the additional content, data, and reporting in a timely manner.

Solution 
The Partnerships, Marketing, and BI teams collaborated to establish a social content strategy and agree on data points to collect through KORE’s DWA social integrations. Throughout the playoffs, the teams ensured that social data was tagged and tracked accurately so it could be easily and quickly collected by the BI team. With the DWA social integrations, the team was able to provide sponsorship recaps to all their partners quicker.

Outcome
KORE’s DWA social Integrations makes it less time consuming to collect social media metrics across all channels and multiple partners. The BI team now collects social data for ALL partners in approximately two hours—93% less time than before. With all their sponsorship social data in one place, it now takes only one hour to create all the partner recaps.

The time saved allowed the Director of BI to focus on the day-to-day needs of the ticketing department, the CRM and lead management as well as create additional reporting.

The Marketing Director invested their saved time in refining messaging strategy and tactics.

The Partnerships Director allocated their time to increasing communication with their 19 partners. The extra communication let them quickly pivot asset inventory and provide recaps faster which resulted in improved partner relationships and successful partnership renewals.

Further, the efficiencies realized with KORE’s DWA social integrations let teams focus on their essential duties, preventing burnout and increasing employee morale.

“The efficiency and automation that the DWA social integrations provided added valuable time that we did not have in our sales and marketing environment. It has created a strategy for us that we are currently applying and building on.”  – Daniel Venegas, VP of Ticket Sales & Service

Last week, our panel at SportTechie’s State of the Industry shared how they are generating partnership ROI with flexible asset mixes, real-time measurement, and reporting.

Flexible Asset Mixes Help Brands Tell Better Stories 

As live sporting events start to welcome back fans, teams are leveraging a mix of new assets and traditional in-game activations to help brands tell their stories better. Matt Goodman, CCO & COO of New York City Football Club shared, “I think it’s our responsibility to find that middle ground where we can stay traditional from an asset mix standpoint, but also find out how do we help them (brands) tell their story.”

Real-time Measurement & Reporting Simplifies Partnership Optimization 

Teams are also providing value to their brand partners through real-time measurement and reporting. As David Burke, EVP of Sales and Business Development for the Pittsburgh Pirates explains that leaner brand budgets during the pandemic have caused partners to get “super smart about how they track their investment and their budgets” so they are evaluating everything.

David summarizes the power of both a flexible asset mix, accurate data, and reporting perfectly, “we’re going to talk (to our partners) about ‘hey, this was your asset mix when there were no fans, this is what we think your asset mix should look when there’s 25%, 50% and 100% (attendance).” 

Watch the full discussion below and find out what new and unique assets will likely carry over into the post-pandemic world. 

Generating Partnership ROI in a Post-Pandemic World

Speakers: 
David Burke (EVP, Sales & Business Development – Pittsburgh Pirates), Matt Goodman (CCO & COO – New York City Football Club), Adam Grow (COO – KORE Software)