Preparing for Your Fan Club’s Offseason

By Nathan Hirsch & Symon Perriman

We hope you have already learned a lot from FanWide’s Guide to Starting and Growing a Fan Club in your Sports Bar. You should now have all the best practices you need to pick your teams, promote your events, host amazing game watch parties throughout the season.

Next, we’ll give you some post-event guidance to engage your guests once the season ends.

Keep in Touch with Fan Club Leaders

Throughout the season you should have already been asking for regular feedback from attendees about how to make their events better. Make sure you ask again once the season is over so you can address any issues which could prevent the group from returning next year. Agree to stay in touch with the organizers and club leaders, and send them a message every few months so that you stay on their radar – this may even lead to new business by helping them organize their non-sports events, such as alumni happy hours, charity fundraisers or booster club meetings.

If you’ve been supporting a college football team, offer to host that alumni association’s basketball games too. Many college sports now broadcast or stream their playoffs, including men’s and women’s soccer, men’s lacrosse, gymnastics, wrestling, track & field, baseball and softball.

Calculate Your Sports Bar’s ROI

Once the season has ended, write down anything which you would have done differently for next season and make sure you check that list. You should also crunch the numbers to understand the return on your investment (ROI). Ask the attendees how they heard about the event and use this information to understand which marketing channels worked the best.

To help you measure your ROI and understand the value of your fan club, we have provided a spreadsheet to help you calculate this (download).

This spreadsheet lets you track each event and the number of attendees.

In this example, you will see the average costs associated with planning these events yourself compared to using a service like FanWide.com which handles most of the planning for you. Make sure you measure the attendance — ideally a few minutes before halftime and before the end of the game — as you’ll count the most fans at these times. Services like FanWide will automatically count attendance for you when users check in at the event.

The following example shows an equal number of attendees for both traditional game watch parties and FanWide’s events. When partnering with FanWide you’ll likely get more fans showing up as they promote all of their events to local sports fans to maximize your potential audience.

Most of your upfront expenses will be fixed costs, as no matter how many attendees come, you’ll have to pay the same, so you want to pack your bar to reduce the cost per patron. Next you need to calculate the hours spent on different tasks, including event planning, promoting, staffing, cleanup, kitchen and other hours, even that time spent finding that fan club looking for a new home. This is an area where you can save a lot of your resources by partnering with an organization like FanWide.com who regularly manages and promotes fan club events.

You need to consider all the costs it took to host this event, including the wages from the hours which you just calculated. Other costs will include marketing, food and beverage, and event supplies. Also add the channel subscription expenses if you purchased a pay-per-view (PPV) or Internet-streaming event.

If you are streaming an entire season, you could divide the total cost for all the games by the number of watch parties you will host, to find the average cost per event. The gameday expenses will be a combination of fixed costs (like staffing) and variable costs (like food). Events which are posted on Facebook or FanWide will also include a count of the expected attendance, which helps operators plan their staffing needs. If there are too few servers or bartenders, fans can become frustrated at the slow service and your bar is not maximizing its revenue.

Now you can calculate your revenue from this event and then determine the event’s profit (or loss). From here you can also review how much each patron costs to attract, how much they spent, and the profit per attendee. Now compare this data to a regular night, and hopefully you will see that the event is a success. You’ll also notice in this example that by reducing your upfront costs on promoting and managing an event by working with FanWide.com, that your average profit per attendee can increase significantly.

Even before the season has ended, you have to keep reminding fans to come back for other events you are hosting, even it they aren’t related to sports. Invite these new patrons to your holiday parties or trivia nights. Make sure that you have posted all of your event photos and videos, then encourage people to tag themselves. Email links to these photo galleries to your mailing list and encourage these fans to stay in touch with each other (and your bar) throughout the year.

Review

Let’s summarize what we have learned in these lessons.

1. First, pick the best sport for the upcoming season.
2. Next is to find the best team’s fan club chapter that is looking for a new home. Reach out to the fan club network or alumni association, and if necessary, also submit an application to be the official fan club chapter host in your area.
3. Then start promoting all of your upcoming events, making sure to use your mailing list along with the big social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram and Facebook).
4. Give your fans an amazing gameday experience like they would get inside their favorite team’s stadium by displaying team colors, cooking local food, and offering a hometown drink special. Play the team’s song and celebrate their culture to give you an edge over other places in your city.
5. Finally, run a post-event survey and continue marketing your year-round events.

Don’t forget that FanWide.com can match you with a local fan club looking for a new home as it runs the world’s largest fan club database with almost 13,000 chapter. FanWide can also help you with digital marketing because when you sign up with FanWide, your fan club and its events will also be listed on search engines to help fans find for a local watch party. When game day arrives, FanWide can also help you predict the attendance to help you optimize your operations and staffing on the big day.

That wraps our series on what it takes to find, create, and grow a fan club. We hope that all of this information gives you the best practices to host that fan club chapter that you always wanted.