revolutioniseSPORT innovation to help sports analyse retention and attrition as they enter COVID-19 recovery

Australia’s leading sports management platform revolutioniseSPORT has launched a new feature designed to provide sporting organisations with insights into how their membership continues to change over time.

The new feature, Retention & Churn, is part of the extended revolutionise360 product suite, which focuses on marketing, data and insights, and sits as an additional analytical layer atop the standard revolutioniseSPORT platform. (Churn refers to rate of attrition or customer ‘churn’, ed.)

The Retention & Churn tool compares 'snapshots' at different points in time and aggregates hundreds of thousands of data points to allow the tracking of member movement and turnover.

revolutioniseSPORT Managing Director, Alex Mednis (pictured below) explained “the focus of sport has always been on growing membership.

“Rather than having a focus on which members have been lost, and why they decided to leave.”

“Sports need help with understanding why they are losing members, and how to really do a deep-dive into member 'churn'.

“The reality though is that this requires the ability to understand enormous volumes of data and to structure the information in a direct, outcomes-driven way that can be used to make decisions. “Where revolutioniseSPORT comes in is that we have both the organisational and technological knowledge to assist sports with this venture.”

“Every sport has churn, and almost always it is much higher than they expect. A marginal improvement in reducing churn can make a noticeable impact on growth. It really comes down to focusing attention and delivering a targeted impact.”

Sport Australia recently conducted research through AusPlay (2020) to track Australian sport participation behaviours to help inform sport delivery. Participation barriers were a key focus, and while these typically varied between sports, common barriers included lack of time, poor health or injuries, increasing age, or a lack of interest in sport or physical activity.

Retention & Churn is designed to provide organisations with this data about their own membership trends, specific to their sport, so they can uncover their own participation barriers and act upon them.

Hockey NSW interim Chief Executive, Craig Beed commented “one of the key business problems facing any sport is where to focus investment in resources, often entering around where the sport needs to grow. However, one of the best decisions we have made is to focus on churn - and deal separately with new, returning and lost members.

"Ultimately it is about personalisation and understanding the key drivers for each membership segment. If we can understand why members leave, we can better assist our associations and clubs to strengthen their member services using data.”

Mednis added “being able to provide this valuable data to sporting organisations means that revolutioniseSPORT’s leading technology is further empowering sports to grow and strengthen as we move into a post-COVID world.”

Originally published in Australasian Leisure Magazine.