Cityzens Rebooted
Cityzens and Cityzenship is something that is always widely debated here. It is something close to the club and is reflective of the club’s relationship with our fans. We’ve just given it the platform it deserves.
The concept of Cityzens is at the heart of everything we do. Whether it’s letting you know first about important news, through to providing a critical channel for feedback on something as important as our identity — through the badge consultation back in 2015. Today, we’re announcing the next version of our Cityzens community platform.
The existing Cityzens offering was our first step to recognising engagement and rewarding participation through attendance. This platform was always at arms-length from the “core” platform and while it served a purpose, the challenge was presented in late 2016 to do something a little more … ambitious.
This is likely to be one of the longer posts you’ll find on here, simply because it’s probably one of the biggest product deliveries we’ve done since the new mancity.com site went live.
Cityzenship and you
Cityzens. Meet mancity.com. Bringing the Cityzens product into the mancity.com domain is more than a symbolic gesture, it’s part of a massive piece of work that looks to consolidate the pile of accounts you might be using to access City content. Whether that’s tickets, supporters clubs or Cityzens, the vision is to use one log in. Not that ground-breaking but monumental in terms of effort when it comes to integrating with a huge number of legacy systems.
Cityzens now sits on the same Azure platform as the core site and acts as the gateway into mancity.com. The new service is built to give you targeted content, rewards, match-day activities, news and so much more. We’ll provide more details of the functionality in a follow-up post, for now it’s time to kick the tyres and see how it all holds up.
The platform is part of an ambitious move towards being more product-focused; learning and iterating as we go. There’s a lot to learn — we know. We’d love to have you along on this ride.
To get to this point, we’ve been working closely as a Digital and Fan Relationship Management team. These two teams have been working tirelessly since that challenge was placed last year. And personally speaking, this is probably one of the most ambitious asks I’ve ever seen. The whole back-end has been created from scratch and an editorial function set-up to support it. We’re doing things with our build partner that very few are even considering. Never mind doing it from scratch, built from a set of user stories crafted in house between Product Management and Loyalty within Digital and FRM.
This, hopefully, translates to a service that is a genuinely unique platform. The front-end is tailored for you. It’s intended to recognise your Supporter Club membership, to reward engagement on Cityzens Voice and to become the definitive timeline of — not just City’s history — but yours. We’ve never really been able to combine key moments with your participation, with your attendance, with your support. We are all, now, Cityzens.
Content is king
This is a big one. The power that is built into the platforms is absolutely useless unless we have content for it to deliver. If we can target content to 21 year olds in New York, we need the content to deliver to them. If we know you love making score predictions, we need to enable that functionality for the game. All of this is content. All of it needs creating. This is a massive effort.
We know that supporting City is more than just following a football club — we can now know who you are and we can ensure you get the best experience from the site, building some truly surprising moments. And we’re excited to be able to do it. You’ll have to have play around with the site to see what we mean…
Cityzens goes social?
<puts hard hat on> From day one we’ve been asked if this is a social network. This is not a social network, nor do we intend to create one. We’re using some functionality that you may be familiar with from social platforms — adding content to a timeline, for example — but this is intended to populate your timeline. This won’t be seen by others.
So, what about profiles? Another comment we’ve heard a lot. We spent a lot of time debating this. Should we make profiles public? Or at least give you the option of creating a public profile? But how do I find you? As a season card holder, if you sit next to me, how do I add you on Cityzens? If I make a score prediction, should you be able to comment on it? If so, who is able to comment? Just you, my “friend”? Or everyone? And how does this impact on check-ins, when you say you will be at a particular pub to watch the game this weekend? Nightmare. And out of scope for this release.
International Cityzens
Cityzens is intended to recognise all fans, irrespective of where you are. It will adapt to this. As we grow, we welcome more fans from the UK and internationally to the platform. It’s these international fans, who can’t be at the Etihad regularly, that we’re also looking to represent alongside those who can and do.
So if you’re in New York, where do you watch the next game? We’ve introduced the concept of the community map to help out with this. If you’re in Malaysia, where is your nearest supporter club? We’re not just able to provide onward journeys, we’re able to recognise that you’ve stated you will be watching the game (wherever that might be), and bring you into the whole match day experience with our global fan-base. Pulling all of this functionality into one place is something fairly new.
We didn’t want to just recreate Facebook’s check in/I’m watching functionality, we wanted to make this an intrinsic part of being a Cityzen. To say ‘I was there’ and have this feature on your timeline — representing all those amazing (and sometimes painful…) moments where you supported your team.
Testing times
Working with our Insights team and testing partners we’ve reached out to a cross section of fans both in the UK and internationally to help review the prototypes. We’ve taken on board a huge amount of this feedback but we don’t just stop work here. Everything is captured and prioritised and we have weekly review and prioritisation meetings.
As with the new web site and forthcoming app releases, we’ve conducted internal and external validation against the concepts and have worked with partners to ensure what we’re building works as well as it can — whilst noting that there is always more to do. We want to get the product live to continue this process as we work towards ‘proper’ product development.
In that spirit of testing and learning, we invite you to provide feedback below, let us know what you think could be improved and what works well for you.
Cityzenship as an identity
For anyone who has bought tickets through the site previously, you’ll be familiar with multiple logins. If you’ve logged in to the previous Cityzens site, another log in. While this project remains ongoing, the aspiration is that you’re able to log in to all City areas using one account. Cityzens is the first service to use the new identity service for real. Fingers crossed eh! ;)
We have migrated over one million records to the new service which has been a challenge in itself, combining this with the whole site build has been ‘entertaining’. And it should be noted that during this whole process the infrastructure has been subjected to numerous penetration and load tests, testing the stability of both data and infrastructure. Data security is paramount. Simple.
Sssh, it’s bendy
The whole point of writing these types of posts is to give insights into what we’ve done and hopefully provide some clarity around why we’ve done what we’ve done. They should also give you some of the more human insights whilst we’re at it — and maybe a nod towards where we’re going.
Cityzens hasn’t just been built on a platform that scales, it’s designed to be flexible. The tools within Cityzens aren’t just for use on Cityzens…. The whole lot could be lifted and dropped elsetwhere. While you’ll have to wait and see where and how this happens, it’s not such a massive leap to come to some conclusions.
Cityzens isn’t ‘just’ Cityzens anymore. It’s as critical and central to our infrastructure as it to being a fan. We are genuinely excited to see where this takes us. Join us as we find out.
Let us know what you think or what you want to see on Cityzens. And — as always — you can get in touch with us directly at @ManCityDigital or just use the comments below. Cityzens is now available to all at www.mancity.com/cityzens
(And finally, a quick mention to those who made this happen. Huge thank-yous to Supporter Services, IT, Insights, Archives, Content, Marketing, the Man City team for their contribution to content, to our external delivery partners and, importantly, our colleagues within the Fan Relationship Management and Digital teams who supported us through the entire delivery)
