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.
Brand Benchmark: $10B in annual value measured
Brand Benchmark lets you aggregate data to derive and extract more insight from it. Access global and category market valuation exclusively available for Hookit customers. Compare your performance and trends within the marketplace and analyze allocation by sport and type.
Key benefits include:
Earned Media Analysis: Measure your sponsorship application
The Earned Media Analysis feature uses the data Hookit it already has to tell a better story of what’s going on with your sponsorships. It measures the amplification of your sponsorships by analyzing the content and exposure from media, industry, peers, influencers, and other brands – and the brand exposure and value that comes with it.
Key benefits include:
Topic Analysis: Discover what partners and prospects care about
Discover the topics that your partners, prospects, and their audiences care about and measure them against the topics that matter to your brand. Topic Analysis helps identify which prospects are best for you to sell to and makes better partnerships. With Topic Analysis, you’re able to see:
The Boston Celtics & the Helix Beta Program: How to De-Code Fan Segmentation for Better Engagement
As part of the Helix beta program, the Boston Celtics began their planning process by focusing on:
- Being intentional: They specifically thought through the business problems they wanted to solve with Helix.
- Generating buy-in: Solve for simple, common, and practical use cases first. Use cases they solved for came from marketing, sales, and service to get buy-in across the organization.
- Maximizing time savings: Cut down on the number of people needed to complete a task and the amount of time a task takes.
Once they understood what they wanted to accomplish with Helix, the Celtics began their journey with four steps.
- Build data sources: The first step was defining the fields they wanted in their data source. With the ability to customize SQL query in Helix, they were able to build queries specific to their business needs.
- Assign Golden Record logic: Since Helix can identify duplicate records based on logic, they set rules on which data points to take from different duplicate records. For example, if an email address matches between three records, they set it so that all three records are listed under the same person.
- Build Tags & Attributes: Tags are like categories (e.g., primary, or secondary ticket buyers) and Attributes are like numerical criteria (e.g., ticket or F&B spend). The Celtics built custom SQL queries that allowed them to assign tags and attributes to their Golden Records. These tags and attributes are what make it possible to build audiences in step 4.
- Build deduped audiences: Now that they set their criteria in steps 1 through 3, any department (e.g., Marketing, BI, or Services) can use Audience Builder within Helix to create audiences, or lists based on Tags and Attributes.
Leveraging Helix, the Celtics were able to take complex SQL queries and simplify them so non-coding employees were empowered to go into the system and create their own audience lists. This simplified and consolidated a previously complex and time-consuming business problem into one that any team member could solve themselves.
Product Updates
Helix
Helix is a fan intelligence platform purpose-built to unify fan data across disparate sources, like digital, social, and live-event channels. It then standardizes, cleans, and enriches your data to create an accurate, comprehensive view of each fan. The result is a reliable, intelligent fan platform with a simple user interface and intuitive drag and drop functionality. Now, non-coding teams, like sales and marketing, can confidently build fan segments for personalized connections at every stage of the fan journey.
At the end of April, we’ll begin to release Helix in batches. In the coming weeks, there’ll be more communication about the rollout and participation process. You do not have to be a KORE DWA customer to use Helix and its features. In fact, one of our initial customers using Helix currently uses Snowflake. If you’d like more information about compatibility with non-DWA vendors, reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Ahead of our full production rollout, there are two large features coming to Helix – configurable CRM data sync and CRM modernization.
- Configurable CRM data sync: This allows configurable and extensible mapping from any data point in your warehouse to a contact record or person account record in your CRM. It also provides the ability to map tags and attributes directly to your CRM custom fields and then use them within your CRM to build advanced customer journeys. For example, to build ticket retention scores, scores can be pushed to CRM using the mapping tool and be surfaced to create advanced journey mapping.
CRM Modernization of Dynamics: This feature will enhance your CRM system by allowing Fan Finder to launch Microsoft Dynamics Native Opportunities.
The Importance of Recaps in Partnership Relationships
In recent years, there’s more pressure on the brands side to justify sponsorship dollars, so we can no longer think of recaps as a yearly requirement. Instead, recaps are being requested more often and when they aren’t provided on time, it can put a strain on partnership relationships.
As we continuously strive to provide the industry-leading Sponsorship platform, we’re always looking at how to improve the recap side of our products to make partnership relationships more effective. When you have effective partnerships, it makes renewal conversations a lot easier.
To further understand where recaps are heading, we asked the audience of our customer forum how often they’re sharing data or recaps with partners. Below is the response breakdown.
2-3 times per season | 29% |
Upon request | 29% |
Halfway through the season | 14% |
Quarterly | 14% |
Monthly | 7% |
At the end of the season | 7% |
When we asked what partners are asking about the most, the audience replied:
More collaboration | 22% |
More data | 22% |
More reporting/dashboards | 22% |
Other | 22% |
No changes | 11% |
Results of our pollshow the growing importance of recaps in optimizing partnerships, securing renewals, and fostering positive relationships.
Intake: Scoring and Weighting
We recently released scoring and weighting features to Intake to help create more effective partnerships. We know from our work with brands that only about 10% of submitted sponsorship applications will be considered. These features help surface those top 10% of opportunities in an automated way. With configurable scoring and weighting, you’re able to analyze the details of potential partnerships and automatically assign a cost per point to make more intelligent data-driven decisions when it comes to finding the right partners.
Activate: Sponsorship Packages and the New URL
The Visualized Sponsorship Packages feature will now keep asset packages grouped when synced from our Sponsorship product over to Activate. Previously, package components were scattered when synced, but now all related components will stay together, and you’ll be able to visually see the packages grouped. This new feature ensures accuracy and efficiency in the way assets are tracked, synced, and reported across both our Sponsorship and Activate products. The new Visualized Sponsorship Packages will be available at the end of March.
Reminder that the new URL for Activate is activate.koresoftware.com. The existing URL will continue to work alongside the new one until end of Q3. We’ll communicate with all Activate customers before the old URL is officially retired.
Sponsorship & Partner Engagement
To continuously improve our Sponsorship product, we made enhancements to the product’s integrity, flexibility, and consistency. Below is a summary of recent upgrades.
Looking forward, we’re in the discovery phase of adding the Approval Workflow feature to Intake. The team is also working on updating the roles and permission functionality to improve security within Intake, Activate, and Evaluate. Within our Sponsorship product, we’re assessing how to optimize Flex Funds so that it’s more flexible.
DWA: Data Snapshots
Coming this April, we’re adding the ability to create customizable daily snapshots of the data you care most about. You’ll own the snapshot criteria and can edit it as needed. Simply create a view in the custom schema and notify KORE that you want to take a snapshot of that view. We’ll set it up to automatically take a daily snapshot and you’ll be able to view these snapshots in Redshift, just like any other data set in DWA.
Adding this feature will allow you to conduct point-in-time analyses, like comparing renewal sales YoY. You’ll also be able to spot macro trends in evolving data sets. For example, identify and track how long deals sit in the pipeline and different stages so you can compare it to historical data to build out more advanced metrics. Another use case is understanding secondary market tickets sales and when prices change to maximize revenue.
DWA: Individual Redshift Users
We’re adding the ability to create unique logins for individual Redshift users. This will increase access security, provide configured permissions for specific tables and data, and let you track changes made to the database on a per user level. This feature will be available early Q2 upon request to your Customer Success Manager.
Integration Catalogue
To date, we’re happy to announce we have 95 total supported integrations. Some of our most recent integration additions and updates include the NFL, Aramark, Sports Engine, and KORE-to-KORE.
For the NFL integration, we added lifetime value data sets and expanded the data we get from shield API, which includes game information and actual play data. This allows you to take time stamps at specific times of a game (e.g., right after a touchdown) and compare it to attendance or POS sales to build more comprehensive analyses based on game data.
We also continue to enhance our KORE-to-KORE integrations. Recently, Activate use cases and features have evolved. So, we’re increasing the data set that flows from Activate to DWA to leverage in your reporting and blend it with other data sets.
All our league integrations – NFL, NHL, MLS, MLB, and NBA – have also been recently upgraded for optimal performance. Further, now that we’ve merged with Hookit, we’re focusing on building robust integrations between our platforms.
Ticketing Integrations
The team is working to improve Archtics ticket data accuracy to address two main challenges, tracking the lifecycle of a ticket and inconsistencies in event revenue reporting. The focus is on taking existing data sets and making them better. This upgrade is currently in progress and should be completed early Q2.
Upcoming Quarterly Customer Forum
Thank you to all who joined us this quarter! We hope to see you at our next customer forum.
KORE is the global leader in engagement marketing solutions, serving more than 200 professional teams and 850+ sports and entertainment properties worldwide, providing practical tools and services to harness customer data, facilitate sponsorship sales and activation, and create actionable insights.
