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Football In A Post-Covid World

In Focus: Jonas Sports

 

Jonas Sports is an enterprise solution for sports clubs and organisations, offering industry leading software solutions with data at the heart. fcbusiness spoke to Sam Nixon about how they are best placed to help clubs in a post-covid world of sport.

 

 

Football has faced major disruption this year and clubs have had to play games behind closed doors. How can Jonas Sports help clubs mitigate the impact of this?

With the lack of fans in stadiums since March, the key challenge has been the diminished revenue streams for football clubs. However, we’re seeing a trend towards online retail, and clubs are capitalising on those revenues. We’ve seen online merchandise sales boom since lockdown – up to 150% increase year-on-year compared to the same time last year and that’s become a major life-line for clubs. Kit launches are becoming more and more lucrative with some clubs making the same number of sales in days as opposed to weeks in previous seasons. All of this has been achieved using Jonas Sports Retail and Data Hub software with support from our expert retail and marketing teams to help our customers maximise sales.

 

We’ve also supported our clubs with a centralised reporting service that helps them be agile in their decision making by providing a true ‘helicopter view’ of the business, tying together operational data into one single dashboard.

 

How important is it that clubs establish stronger connections with fans during this time?

It’s as important as ever, if not more important. We believe clubs should make sure that fans are being communicated to across the variety of platforms and that the data is collected to help inform future decision-making and personalisation of communications. The traditional fan in a stadium needs to be re-thought. There’s a physical and a digital ‘subscription’ that could replace the traditional Season Ticket product that I think will come out of this and that could provide more revenue streams for clubs going forward.

 

Is it vital that clubs understand their fans’ behaviours and motivations and how will data help them achieve this?

Data is such a valuable commodity in all areas of business. The data captured within our systems all feeds into the CRM to build up a picture of each fan and create the demographics to develop personalisation and segmentation strategies which we can amplify using our marketing product, and to align potential sponsors with their database.

 

How can you help clubs’ welcome fans back to stadiums?

A key challenge for clubs as fans return will be to prepare stadiums for the contactless revolution. From the retail shops to catering facilities, everything can be digital and contactless from online store to stadium concourse. Fans will need to ‘click and collect’ and ‘grab and go’. Our software can help clubs migrate to a more digital world within a stadium.

 

How does Jonas Sports help club decision-makers understand what’s happening in the digital and physical worlds?

Jonas Sports is a group of ‘best of breed’ software companies that currently provides CRM, retail, food & beverage, marketing, ticketing and payments with more on the horizon. These components are available individually, but the real strength is using some, or all, to generate one complete overview of the physical and digital environment. This is how Jonas Sports is unique, offering industry leading solutions within one group.

 

This enables combined reporting, aggregating data from Jonas Sports software components. Rather than having to log in to multiple systems to see reports on how each part of the business is performing, our view is that the decision makers should have access to a centralised reporting dashboard. Within a single post-match report, we can show information that includes match attendance, how many season ticket holders came through access control, top selling retail items, the number of burgers sold, and even fan sentiment. This ‘helicopter view’ will help clubs make the important decisions needed to successfully run their football club and grow revenues.

 

Jonas Sports: Our Mission

To be the complete sports enterprise solution for sports clubs. Our mission is to offer the best individual solutions that work together to provide a full fan and operational overview of the club in one place.

 

For more information visit: www.jonassports.com