NC Fusion implemented its campaign to encourage girls to stay active in sports

A youth sports organization that had a crisis of participation deployed its martech department, a one-person operation, to create a marketing campaign that raised awareness among key audiences.

Who: NC Fusion is a nonprofit youth sports organization operating in the Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point (“Triad”) region of North Carolina. It has its origins in soccer but now also offers field hockey and lacrosse.

Chris Barnhart is the marketing director/department of NC Fusion. “We believe that we can create sports experiences with a purpose, which can change people’s lives,” said Barnhart. “Any child who participates in a team sport learns valuable lessons about how to get along with others and work with people from different backgrounds to achieve a common goal. All the things we need to succeed in life. “How to win but also lose and have fun.”

What? A nationwide study found that girls quit sports two times more often than boys by the age of 14. The pandemic made the problem worse, as more girls in 12th grade dropped out of sports than any group. NC Fusion wanted to know if it was happening to their members.

“Of Course, We Said, ‘Not Us. Barnhart said, “No, we run a great program. “But nobody was satisfied by just an opinion. So I began collecting data from our various sources. “Using Microsoft Power BI I accessed those different data sources, and brought them all into one place.”

DataBarnhart compared the number and age of female football players with those of boys, and then compared the changes over time.

He said: “We found that we started losing girls at 13, exactly the same as the national average. By the time we reached 17, we had lost half of the girls.” “That is twice the national average. It’s inevitable that you will lose players. But losing them at this rate was unacceptable.

The decline in the number of people using the services was more important to the organization than the numbers of people who used them. The organization’s goal is to provide transformative sporting experiences for all youth. However, these experiences are especially important for young girls and women.

According to The Women Sports Foundation:

94% female executives who are now in the C-suite played sports as children, including 52% of those at university.

The Tech:Barnhart joined NC Fusion in 2007 after a career spent working in the health care industry. The job was appealing to him in many ways because his children had been through the program. The state of technology when he arrived was…interesting.

He said: “Youth clubs were founded by volunteers, and they are run by volunteers at the start.” “So when youth clubs grow, they still have the volunteer mentality of ‘Let us piece things together.’ It’s best to keep things cheap.

Dig deeper: U.S. Soccer personalizes marketing by using customer data.

He made a quick assessment, and realized that he needed to have everyone on the same platform. He selected Microsoft, installed Outlook on everyone’s computers and started Teams immediately. He said that the COVID hit just a year earlier, and we were in a perfect position.

After that, he needed to find a way to gather all of the data from his organization in one location. Information from external websites was used, as well as registrations, player sheet, player reviews, and more. He was able to finally get it all into Microsoft’s Azure Data Lake using data scraps and APIs.

NC Fusion’s initial thought was that girls are leaving soccer to pursue other sports. They added field hockey and lacrosse. This was not the answer. They then started to talk to former players.

Barnhart explained, “They were honest with us and told us, ‘It didn’t feel like it for me.'” It could be for a variety of reasons, from feeling like they weren’t good enough to friends leaving. It made us angry that we weren’t making them feel welcome.

The Opportunity:Last Year, the NC Fusion Executive Team realized that the Women’s World Cup would be a great opportunity to spread their message. They’ve started a series two-minute videos in which an accomplished older woman writes a letter to her younger self about how sports has helped them.

He said, “We began by asking the NC Fusion staff which has more women than men.” Sarah Bridges, CXO of our company, said, “Absolutely. I am passionate about this. I’m not afraid to speak on camera. “I’ll be the first to go out of the gate.

The first video was released a couple of weeks ago. The next step will be an athletic trainer, and then some staff from other countries. Barnhart also wants women who have careers other than sports.

Barnhart said that youth soccer in the United States does not do well because they have all their pyramids for a path to prodom. Many people see that and think, “I’m not going pro.” Why am I doing it? We’re now pushing to show that professional does not necessarily mean soccer. You could become a doctor, or own a small company. We want to make our pyramid wider, not so tight at the top. This allows people to say, “Yes, this is the way you get to professional levels.”

The campaign is:NC Fusion will run 15-second teaser advertisements locally during the World Cup broadcast and cable. The ad says why girls are leaving school. The QR code takes people to a page that contains the entire video. Microsoft Marketing is also used to send an email campaign that targets 30,000 parents, explaining why they should be interested. They are only targeting the parents for ethical and legal purposes. They can target parents of female players aged between 12 and 15 thanks to the data sets that they have.

He said: “We can send targeted messages to these folks, saying ‘Your daughters is playing our sport, we know that. But, there are some things we want you keep in mind’.” Barnhart limits personalization to the use of only the family name.

“We’re having to decide how far we want to push the Microsoft [AI-powered] Co-Pilot Technology. “What are we willing to accept and what will we not accept?” he asked. “With social media, no longer do we push certain channels. We don’t want our children to be on social media 24/7 because they are mostly under 15 years old. We don’t force them to watch an instructional video on YouTube because we know that once they do, they will be there for three hours.

He uses Facebook and Instagram which are aimed at an older audience. They moved their videos off of YouTube and onto Vimeo, as it allows them to control what other videos are suggested.

Microsoft has created a journey for the emails that allows them to target responses. Barnhart explained that they look at the responses, who has opened it and who did not. We retarget those who didn’t open the email after a few weeks and work our way downward. Then, when the video is released, we will send a follow-up email to those who did not open it. We’ll also continue on that same journey, based on trends such as opening or not opening and engaging or not engaging.

The answer: After a week, they had over 900 people view the video. They track how far people get into the video. “Overall, 67% of the total video has been completed, which is good for us.”

This is a great thing for everyone.

The article NC Fusion’s campaign to encourage girls to stay active in sports first appeared on MarTech.