Embracing Supporters Clubs

You move to a new town; you naturally update the address on your bills, sort out your council tax and bash in <insert your relevant TV box name here> to catch the game at the weekend. Done.

But, you’re missing your City fix — or you just want to get involved with some like-minded people wherever you find yourself. To bolster the Club’s offering, we worked with our Fan Relationship Management team here in Manchester to develop a new hub for discovering local supporters clubs everywhere.

Although this isn’t a ground-breaking piece of technology, it does combine a number of different systems that we use to streamline the processes of joining and creating clubs. We opted for a simple structure that allows us to deliver content and news to the site and integrated with MapBox to enable a beautifully customised map view of the world. The ability to reinforce the brand palette here works well, whilst not detracting from the focus on search.

We use the MapBox map and overlay data from the supporter’s club portal system, a management tool that will look after all of the clubs and enable us to integrate tools like this seamlessly into the user experience.

Where we’re up to

This is pretty much what you have currently — a search and discovery tool that lets you find your local club. Or somewhere further afield. Whatever. We also built tools for galleries and news sections. More on those shortly.

As a fan, you’re able to find a club anywhere on the planet and request to join it. The whole process from your side — and theirs (the club admin) — is now handled online so if there isn’t a club near you, you can easily kick-off the process of setting one up.

This approach is designed to bring the experience of finding your local supporters club in-line with standard searching conventions we’re all used to. But we wanted to do a bit more. Tying in with the launch of the new mancity.com site, we wanted to capitalise on the news that was relevant to supporters clubs so we’re now hand-cranking some XML and feeding that in while we wait for a more automated implementation coming out of the Sitecore 8 CMS.

Where we’re aiming

There’s plenty of development left to do on this site and we’ll be using data to ensure we’re focusing our efforts in the right place. Currently, we’re looking at expanding our image gallery offering — this is something we always wanted to do from day one but rather than delay the project further, we would iterate. We’ll be looking at tagging content from social media so we can associate these images with the relevant club.

The foundation code for the gallery is pretty much there and can pull in content from Twitter and Instagram based on a custom set of queries. But we can do more and we’ll be looking at this as part of the next tech spike.

Back to the news content, we’ll be looking at making this more relevant using custom tagging and automation but we do have dependencies with other systems before setting this live. We’ll provide an update when this ships.

While we continue to work on this product, we’d love to hear what you think. Add your feedback below, or drop us a tweet.