Learn how Netball New Zealand launched an interactive engagement experience across 47 games and used these engagements for smart data collection.

The Partner

Netball New Zealand (Netball NZ) is the national governing body for netball in New Zealand, established in 1925. It oversees netball's promotion, development and management across the country, from grassroots participation to elite competition. The organization also operates the ANZ Premiership, the premier Netball Competition in New Zealand and is crucial in advancing the sport internationally.

Background

“One of the biggest things we’ve been focusing on this year is fan engagement, and just really creating more opportunities for fans to be involved.”

Emma Fowlie, League General Manager, and John Whiting, Digital and Content Strategy Lead were tasked with increasing the level of engagement Netball New Zealand has with netball fans, while introducing new digital tools and data collection strategies in 2024. Their partnership with Tradable Bits allowed Netball New Zealand to trial new fan engagement methods, particularly through integrating interactive fan voting into their broadcasts, season-long.

The Challenges Netball NZ Tackled

1. Unknown viewership

Coming into their 2024 season, the Netball NZ team acknowledged a viewership data gap: while they could quantify and reach the fans purchasing tickets, they did not have much information about the fans watching from home.

2. Interactive engagement within broadcast

Netball New Zealand has a close relationship with their broadcast partners Sky Sport. In 2024 they were focused on enhancing their viewership experience through more interactive additions to their run of show.

Strategy: Transforming their ANZ Player of the Match into an interactive broadcast experience

Before the ANZ Premierships’ 2024 season, the ANZ Player of the Match was already a staple of their broadcast experience, however, Emma saw an opportunity for improvement:

“In previous years, we had the Sky Broadcast Commentary team select an MVP for each match, and that is who they would interview at the end of the game.” Emma noted,

“I noticed that fans were commenting on the MVP and either agreeing or disagreeing with it, and I thought, why don’t we give them the opportunity to have a say and see what happens.”  

The broadcasting team was also keen to introduce a more interactive element to their run-of-show. At the end of the day, all they needed was a player to interview, and they were happy to give fans the ability to choose their own MVP. 

That’s when Tradable Bits was brought into the picture, and a new version of the ANZ Player of the Match was born. 

Here is how this new vision was implemented:

1. Elevating the Fan Experience with Tradable Bits

Netball NZ needed a way to experiment with more interactive formats without substantially increasing the workload on their digital team. Tradable Bits’ engagement platform was the perfect tool to transition “like and comment” contests into manageable and easily quantifiable digital experiences. Today, the Netball NZ team has a flexible toolkit to bring their many creative ideas to life without worrying about how to execute them digitally. As John put it,

“The outputs we were focused on were increasing engagement and getting our fans interacting more with the league, the broadcaster, the teams and the players. The bonus for me is that we’re gathering a whole bunch of user data, and the ability to communicate with our fans in a more personal way - a great kicker on the side.”

2. Collaboration with broadcast partners and their tech

It started with a QR code. 

It ended with a campaign fully integrated with Sky Sport tech to showcase live results and real-time reporting across broadcast.

Netball NZ approached this project iteratively, testing and improving how they delivered the interactive MVP vote as they went. As Emma put it,

“It wasn’t a huge, chunky piece of work. It was really just lots of conversations, and I think the good part is that we evolved it over the first three or four rounds, making tweaks as we went.”

3. Data collection across all 47 matches

Since Netball NZ wanted to uncover more about the fans watching their games from home, they  used their 2024 season to start building a clearer picture of this audience. John’s team worked strategically to introduce progressive prospecting questions to fill out their database so that at the end of the 2024 season they would have a broad depth of data about the fans participating from home.

What does this ground-work mean for their next season?

With a deeper understanding of their fandom, their team has more ability to ask questions about how these fans interact with them, and can create more hypotheses about how to improve their marketing. Questions like, “Are these viewers from home also buying tickets? How are they coming to us? Which teams do these fans support?”

And of course, at the core of their interactive voting experience, Netball NZ was also able to understand which players resonate with fans to understand how they can connect and grow the sport overall. John noted,

“For me, it’s about the ability to start putting fact on paper about what were previously assumptions. For example, we’ve made assumptions on the players we think fans will love the most, and while a lot of those assumptions have been proven true, throughout this process we’ve also seen a lot of surprises. Which is awesome to see.”

47 Games later, the outcomes:

1. Enhanced Fan Interaction

Netball NZ successfully introduced an improved piece of content to their broadcast run of show  that increased interactivity with the broadcast content.

• Between their first trial of this campaign last year, and their complete implementation of it this year , Netball NZ saw a 1,889% increase in engagement - fans actively participating in the campaign.
  
  
• In addition to the massive increase in the number of fans participating in the campaign, Netball NZ also saw sustained engagement. While they were prepared to see a drop off in the number of fans participating after the first month of rolling the campaign live, they hardly saw a dip in numbers match-over-match.
  
  
• Finally, while the campaign itself just takes a moment to choose an MVP, the cumulative eyeball time on the campaign exceeded 1112 hours. That’s 46 days of active engagement just on the campaign, not including the MVP interview, or commentary throughout the broadcast. 

2. Comprehensive Data Collection and Marketable Fans

Netball NZ successfully tackled their goal of uncovering more about the fans watching from home.

• Throughout the season, 78% of all fans who participated in their match MVP vote were entirely new fans to the Netball NZ database.
  
  
• Beyond participation, Netball NZ also saw a 60% opt-in rate to comms and direct communication.
  
  
• Finally, as an example of how they’re leveraging this data, their team uncovered that 38% of participating fans were watching games on broadcast and choosing MVPs for matches that did not include their favourite team, identifying them as a segment of fans who are fans of the sport at large. A segment they plan to leverage in 2025. 
  
  

What's Next

For next season, Netball NZ wants to build upon this new foundation, exploring ways to add more performance statistics to their MVP to make it easier for fans to make decisions. They’re also keen to explore how to integrate their engagement efforts more holistically across all of their marketing channels, having a clear plan for socials, versus broadcast, versus in-venue. 

In Summary

Netball New Zealand’s collaboration with Sky Sport and Tradable Bits has set a new standard for interactive fan engagement across broadcast. Beyond creating an environment for fans to actively engage with netball even when at home, they’ve also gained valuable insights about these fans to drive future strategies. Their work in the 2024 season highlights that enriching the fan experience doesn’t need to be complicated - it just needs to be well organized, well communicated and well measured.