Fan Plans: To Build Attendance, Sustain Sell Outs, Increase Revenues

  1. Fan Plan components and approach
  2. Specific Components
  3. Additional Parts of an Anntendance and Gate Revenue
  4. Bottom Line Reminder

Fan Plan Components and Approach

We can help develop the components and approach of a successful Fan Plan:

  • Increasing Attendance and Gate Revenue
  • PR
  • Generating Fan Excitement
  • Attendance Building Strategies Goals
  • Increase season ticket sales
  • Increase regular season game attendance
  • Generate Greater Recognition of the team as the Community’s Team
  • Create “in” status to wear team caps, jackets, gear
  • Create increase in Team clothing sales $250,000 to $500,000
  • Enable wearing at least a Team cap as something “everyone” does
  • Specific programs for increasing attendance
  • Strategy of frequent presentations to civic organizations
  • Strategy and plan to offer discount ticket prices in every back to school packet
  • Include extensive Internet and Email strategies
  • See Business Development PR Strategies
  • See Internet Strategies


Successful Fan Plans Consider including:

  1. Rallying the citizenry across the City, State and Region around the Team.
  2. Dispelling the false belief that any team only belongs to the fans who attend games at stadiums. Many millions watch nation wide and world wide on broadcast/cable/satellite TV, listen on radio, and read about them in the newspapers and in magazines, all of whom join together with the team around the world, throughout the week, in front of the TV, at the water cooler, at the lunch wagon, in the fields, on the docks, in the dorm rooms, at breaks between school classes, around the breakfast table, on any break, to talk about their favorite team, players, and plays, and the upcoming games, and share the joy with each other that the team brings.
  3. Recognizing that the stadium is the Team’s stage, its TV studio, beamed worldwide.
  4. Recognizing and building on the fact that the team brings needed enjoyment and enchantment to fans.
  5. Doing more to bring women into the fan base: home games provide opportunities for women to enjoy football, as they move beyond the "soft side of Sears" to the "tool" side, in terms of both enjoyment of the game and camaraderie with fellow women fans, as well as provide them with a greater understanding of an experience enjoyed by their fathers, brothers, boy friends, husbands, and sons.
  6. Bonding team and community: home games also provide all fans with one of the few places left where any fan can engage in bonding with others, which takes place either at the game, before the TV set, in reading the same newspaper and magazine pieces, or in discussing it with others anywhere, anytime, any how.
  7. Being enchanted at home games, fans gather by the tens of thousands to sing, dance, sway, do the wave, and get carried away with the enchantment of it all. When the Mets won their last championship series game in NYC 2000, before moving on to Atlanta and defeat, the fans stood for 15 minutes, singing and celebrating and enjoying the moment. The Fan Plan is to build on this kind of fan experience.
  8. Positioning the Team to serve as a great collective choir director, as the citizens of the state and region join in the chorus to sing and dance and feel, if only for that moment and in the subsequent moments when the memory is recalled, an enchantment of life, transcending the ordinary everydayness of life.
  9. Positioning the Team to serve as a rallying cry around which diverse people find a common point on which to enjoy, and through which they find another point of meaning and excitement in the shared community of fandom.

Other Potential Components of Fan Plan Programs
Fan Plans and their components will be based on the needs and desires to develop strong and lasting connections with the community, service organizations, and schools in order to make it happen. Helpful will be to do research into other team activities in their communities. Interviews need to be held with owners, coaches, staff, and players, to get their stories, take their pictures, and develop solid media kits.

  1. And example of a Fan Plan is the "Hero Days at the Stadium Program"
    1. Targeted give aways: bobble heads and/or playing cards (1st 5,000 through turnstiles,
      10,000, to be determined)
    2. Recognition ceremony for everyday community heroes selected for that game
    3. One or more per season (start a new tradition)
    4. Playing cards. Give away a unique set that introduces the community to community heroes, 52 in all, which would be changed each year as the community selects those to be honored
    5. Bobblehead giveaway, along with other merchandize sales promotions.
  2. Outreach to families and adults through kids in school and youth football: tens of thousands of kids attend K-12, and many play in youth football leagues, such as Pop Warner and Boys and Girls Clubs. They can be reached through packets given them through their "Back to School" folders.

Additional parts to consider as options for developing an attendance building strategy

  1. Generating partnerships and alliances with other businesses for the Community Hero Program.
  2. Make the web site a web portal to a world of fun, entertainment, and spending options
  3. Conduct, as needed, a “charm offensive” to minimize negative perceptions
  4. Target two presentations/week for five months prior to the season (40 presentations) to civic organizations
  5. Game day pre-game or half time golf clinics
  6. Fishing tournaments.

Bottom Line Reminder
Failure to aggressively engage in an a “win the hearts of the fans” PR campaign canresult in the LOSS of opportunity revenues, including not only ticket and merchandise revenues but also the even greater loss of potential local revenues as seen in 40 Revenue Streams in 26 (mostly locall revenue) Categories. Credibility and appearance are everything and a Fan Plan following the guidelines of this site can result in huge revenue increases. Not following them can result in stagnant revenue or revenue losses.

Using modest numbers (highest NFL ticket prices are $75 each), we can see from these numbers using $35 as the average ticket prices, what the gains and what the losses can be for a successful Fan Plan or lack of one:

Potential Revenue Gains [or losses] from these increases [or not] in attendance

 

1,000 more fans

2,000

5,000

10,000

15,000

20,000

35,000

45,000

Single home game (Avg $35/ticket)

$35,000

$70,000

$175,000

$350,000

$525,000

$700,000

$1,225,000

$1,575,000

Season of 10 home games

$350,000

$700,000

$1,750,000

$3,500,000

$5,250,000

$7,000,000

$12,250,000

$15,750,000

 

Potential Revenue Gains [or losses] based on Family of Four Spending $200/game

 

  9,000 families

12,000

15,000

18,000

Single home game (Avg. $35/ticket)

1,800,000

2,400,000

3,000,000

3,600,000

 Season of 10 home games

18,000,000

24,000,000

30,000,000

36,000,000