TSG Helps Newcastle United Get Personal with Fans

Newcastle United FC has invested in a new data analysis technology to help the club save time, make more insightful marketing decisions – and ultimately improve off-pitch experiences for the fans.

With ‘The Magpies’ facing a season outside of the top flight for only the 7th time in their 123 year history, the club will be using a data analysis tool called Qlik Sense to help keep the turnstiles turning, and improve fan engagement.

The club has also chosen Newcastle headquartered, IT solutions company – Technology Services Group (TSG), to implement the technology.

Chris Scott, Ticket Retentions Manager at Newcastle United, explained “Fan engagement and reward is hugely important to us, and we’re committed to doing it better. We want to be able to offer the fans a more bespoke experience, depending on what they enjoy doing whilst they’re at the Stadium.

We also wanted to vastly improve our online communication methods so that we could provide our fans with much more relevant, targeted and regular information. The investment in Qlik Sense will help us gain a deeper understanding of our fan base.”

BI and Reporting Analyst for TSG, Stuart Wannop, explained “Qlik Sense is a hugely powerful tool for analysing data and helping businesses of any size easily make quick and informed decisions. Its intuitive, self-service functionality means it is very simple to build insightful ‘stories’ from what on the surface appears to be a mass of unsorted data.”

TSG helped Newcastle United cleanse a database of over one million individual contacts from ticket sales, stadium tours, club membership and corporate hospitality. This data was then inputted into the Qlik Sense system so it can be intelligently managed and interpreted on an ongoing basis.

Qlik Sense allows the club to spot hidden trends within its data, – bringing it alive to help its marketing and increase levels of fan engagement. For example, the club can see the attendance of 24 different matches by age band in seconds – rather than spending hours re-coding the data.

Scott added, “Thanks to the expertise of TSG, we have made a very complicated activity, now very simple and manageable. I’m confident we’ll employ Qlik Sense to inform business decisions across other areas of the Club. It’s still early days, but having seen the results so far, the sky really is the limit.”

View the case study here.