And that’s my frustration. Financial yield Vs top line numbers. In reality it should be a balance. Club needs to maximise yield to deliver bottom line.
However as I said in another post, if Essendon had been proactive the last 20 years in building a business that ensured the club wouldn’t be reliant on footy performance to return a profit, ‘yield’ would be less critical (still important) and they could balance it more.
There’s the Collingwood and Richmond economic model. Interestingly Richmond have exhausted their reserved seating capacity at the MCG. So when combined with onfield success, you can deliver maximum growth and maximise yield concurrently. That’s why they’ve become a financial powerhouse and expanded their supporter base. The desirable outcome. Then there’s the Essendon financial model. For many reasons I always preferred the former. That was what Essendon basically pioneered in the late 1990’s before we let Collingwood in.
It’s generally been successful for clubs. However, there’s a big watch out. Risk is you allow members who’ve always been 11 game members downgrade to 3 gamers / Beyond the Boundary type offers etc. This is especially risky for poor performing sides where members want to remain but go less.
You can see it in financials. I’d say last decade our membership number has grown 100% however revenue has probably only grown only 30%.
The untapped opportunity is in converting your interstate and non active fans to membership. Challenge yet to be solved has always been lack of sufficient value to justify cost. Essendon are unique along with Collingwood to have huge national support. Yet it hasn’t in my view made a good fist of creating packages to encourage our national following to sign up. I’ve always wondered why it doesn’t leverage its sponsors to build up an interstate package to create this value. Eg: 20% discount vouchers for hotels, car rentals, entertainment venues to help interstate fans book an ‘Essendon Footy Bonanza Melbourne Weekend’ during the season. With membership match access for 1-2 games in Victoria… Creative thinking. This also helps create ‘trial’ of sponsorship products / services. Everyone wins. That’s just one idea… There’s always solutions if enough focus and effort is invested.
not saying or implying it wasn’t smart or doesn’t offer value, merely that it’s a tool used to artificially increase membership numbers, which in collingwoods case was used to sell biggest club in the land, and therefore sell that to sponsors.
It adds value to supporters in the situation you mentioned, it also adds value to potential buys for sponsors products.
I’d love for clubs to have to stipulate how many members are fully fledged supporters who buy the minimum 11 home game membership and how many of the overall are 3 gamers. that or not count 3 game memberships in the overall count, but that’s just a personal bug bear that probably holds no relevance to anyone else that doesn’t really care or value absolute honesty, or as close to it as possible.
Perfect example of a club that provides value to a local community in need. Not shoving membership and merch sales down people’s throats……… but gaining genuine community support and media attention by doing good for the community.
Just saw a clip of the dogs match sim, they had a HUGE number of fans there.
Almost as if they gave them more than a days notice they would be having a meet and greet after, they even advertise their training days.
We are even behind a tin rattler club like the dogs for fan engagement, shame
Lack of onsite car parks restrict us from having a crowd.
Most of the other clubs have their training near public transport which reduces the need for on site car spaces.
They may need to strike a deal with a nearby car park for free car spaces and shuttle bus fans back and forth.
didn’t big petey and snelling go and do some sand bagging help during the off season during the wild rain, then got somewhat criticised on social media for using it as a photo opp.
when you look at it most clubs do a bit of work in local community, however that doesn’t sell newspapers, or get clicks and comments and moral outrage so it’s not wildly reported.
Essendon has much work to do commercially. I think it’s become pedestrian and certainly gone from being proactive / innovative to meandering along. Its external review indicates it’s fallen away so it’s not me making it up. Covid appears to have robbed it of physical resources and its once coveted innovative and proactive DNA that made it leading in the industry. Will be interesting to see how they go securing their principle partners in the coming year or two. Essendon has among the top 3 lucrative major partner arrangements in the competition… Achieved without years of success I might say.
Vozzo has commenced. They’re hiring for lots of roles. Let’s hope they fill the roles with quality people and they passionately chase improvement across the commercial area.
Let’s give them a bit of time to start making progress. PS: Hopefully those seats and shade covers at The Hangar are on their way😄
I notice you often reference covid as a reason for setting the club back but we were surely already well down the wrong path before that.
Is there anything to suggest that there were things being put in place to turn it all around coming in to 2020, that were lost due to the covid cuts across the league?
says the person who started this thread 2 months after the external review findings criticising how little they’ve done and implemented to improve things, somehow expecting a whole bunch of seats to be installed in said timeframe.
it’s also very contradictory to say essendon has a lot of work to do commercially, it’s fallen behind in proactive and innovative ideas, then claim essendon are the in the top 3 lucrative partners in the comp.
so which one is it, do they need to do work, or are doing as well as they can, as you point out without onfield success ?
I reference covid in the context the Club had to offload a significant amount of heads in its commercial team (like all clubs). I don’t believe these heads have been replaced in full. Meaning those left have had to work harder and spread themselves more thinly across tasks. Things either stop being done or weren’t serviced as well.
Yes, i agree things have been slipping for a few years. I believe the loss of Rodski was a key moment where things changed. Until then there’s was visible effort to connect with fans and take fans on the Clubs journey. That’s my view anyway.
There’s no question things slipped in the last two years or so. Most notably due to covid.
Yes, Essendon do have one of the most lucrative guernseys. This is a ‘sponsorship’ function and doesn’t relate specifically to ‘fan connection’ which I treat differently in this context. Two distinctly different areas.
Further, the agreements pertaining to these lucrative partnerships were I think put in place between 3-5 years ago (Fujitsu / Amart) and were further built and developed after the original deals were set up even prior to this.
but this is the point i keep making to you, if they have all of that pull without “fan engagement and connection” why exactly do they have to change ?
I get why from a fans perspective as you’re emotionally tied to the club like the rest of us, but from their POV they can do the barest of bare minimums and still be such a lucrative investment to fans and sponsors.
As I’ve brought up multiple times in this thread, the best way to sell your product is to add genuine value to people’s lives in a meaningful way…. Without shoving sponsorship, memberships and merch sales down people’s throats.
There will always be a core group of members who have been signed up to the club for 40+ years, are just happy to have their regular seat at Docklands (as a minimum).
But to build your audience (And we are not talking about us tragics who talk about the club on here multiple times a day) the club needs to do more.
Winning helps. But we haven’t done that for 20 years. You need to provide value to supporters, who have never/rarely been a member. You need to build an audience with newly arrived families in Australia, by gaining trust and investing in their communities and schools.
My family were huge supporters of Collingwood, Carlton and Geelong …. But none of them ever bought memberships. They never felt the need to buy them.
Clubs need to work harder to get supporters to buy memberships…… and it’s even more important for Essendon to work harder in this area as we have been the least successful club over 20 years.
Because those lucrative deals were achieved on among the most impressive overall metrics that have taken years and decades to build. Sponsorship deals are sold and leveraged on the back of membership numbers and ‘young’ demographics and profile (where they reside), strength of social media and metrics (Facebook, Twitter, Insta reach and depth), TV numbers, brand profile (national footprint), corporate and supporter networks / profile links and fan and member engagement and passion levels etc. The work and development of most of these areas commenced in the Sheedy era and have evolved since.
As a result, despite no recent success, Essendon has among the most passionate supporters, a high membership relative to success, a national supporter base few clubs can boast and among the strongest corporate, coterie and business network in the AFL. All this being very attractive to sponsors, and Essendon is attractive to big multinationals wanting national profile and reach.
And why does all this matter? Because Essendon has almost zero cash reserves (largely due to fallout of saga). Its assets are largely property and we want continued investment in football etc. further, The Hangar is now close to 10 years old and over the next 5-10 years will need further significant investment to ensure it keeps pace with newer and more advanced projects being build across the sporting landscape. Then there’s the cost of reimagining Windy Hill (reported cost: $50M), investment in The Hangar to make it more of a ‘Club’, refurbishments of Melton Country Club. And all this requires tens of millions of dollars the Club hasn’t got, or in my view hasn’t got a robust locked business plan to deliver necessary funding without significant government help or, dare I say it, hitting up high net worth supporters again.
So that’s why all this is important in the broader context of our Club growing and succeeding the next decade…
Good post. Your point is correct. Provide perceived value broadly to all supporters and community demographics and the sponsorship, membership, merchandise will follow. This is true. And improving fan engagement and connection interrelates with all these areas.
Community engagement is the key to adding value to people’s lives.
Ie. if the club runs Breakfast clubs at local primary schools in the North-Western Suburbs. What value does this add to the local community?
Local families who are new to Australia, build a strong relationship with the football club and staff. The club provides free healthy food for children who often go hungry…… and the families become casual Essendon supporters.
The key thing is, that it costs the club nothing…. Because it’s funded by State government grants.
You just need to have qualified Community engagement team to deliver it. Not Marketing staff.
I just can’t understand how anyone can argue against these sorts of programs.
