How to Create an Attention-Grabbing Fan Engagement Application: Our Client’s Case

The phenomenon of sport as part of the entertainment industry and show business lies in the emotional connection it creates between the athletes and sports fans. People flock to the sports arenas and stadiums not just to witness the heights possible to reach physically, but to feel the spirit of competition and live through something extraordinary. It’s also emotional for athletes: fans stir up their motivation to work harder and reach higher. Just recall how discouraged football players felt during the COVID pandemic, when the stadiums were empty.

So the connection between sportsmen and their fans is truly critical. This is where fan engagement techniques come into play, creating unique experiences fans will remember and come back for. And as rapid digitalization of all possible domains started, sports and fan engagement were no exception: sports federations and clubs got ready to embrace technology to drive fan loyalty and deeper, more meaningful connections with them. 

As a software development company with expertise in sports apps development, in this article, we’ll provide an overview of this technology domain, wide open to creativity and innovation, and share some of our practical insights about developing sports applications. 

What Is a Fan Engagement App?

Fan engagement apps are web and mobile software platforms that enable users to closely follow their favorite sports club’s news, announcements, and events, communicate with them in a more personalized way, buy or win merch, etc.  Fan engagement in sports aims at establishing stronger connections, trust, and loyalty with their fans for growing their popularity and serves as an additional monetization method through communication channels, exclusive content, special activities, and other means.

Fan engagement apps may take different forms and features, ranging from a simple social-media-like forum where fans can organize a closed niche community for discussing and interacting with their favorite team to feature-rich, state-of-the-art applications providing immersive experiences and numerous interaction opportunities.

What Are the Benefits of Fan Engagement Applications?

As we’ve already mentioned, the connection between sports and fans is mutual, which means fan engagement solutions bring benefits to both fans and sports organizations. Such benefits include:

Direct Communication

Sports fans feel more included when their club offers them a communication channel that can deliver updates in real time, from an official source, and directly to them. No need to search through social media groups, sort out irrelevant or fake information, or wait for updated news reports – all information is at your fans’ fingertips as soon as it airs. For a sports organization, the use of a dedicated club app for communication is also a guarantee that their content will reach the most loyal and interested audience. Can there be a better platform for this than your own app?

Feedback Collection

Similarly to sharing news in a dedicated space, collecting feedback from a single platform is faster and more convenient, too. Also, on your own application, you can implement custom feedback categories to automate feedback filtering and make further data analysis faster and easier. This, in turn, will streamline the implementation of changes your audience expects, driving even more fan loyalty and support.

New Opportunities

Offline experiences are critical, but digital interactions help negate the time and distance, bringing your sports organization closer to fans all over the world within seconds. Plus, innovative technologies used in fan engagement apps like augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), artificial intelligence (AI), NFC, IoT, etc., help create more personalized, immersive, multi-sensory user experiences that make your team more memorable and interactions with it – more luring. In addition, unique application features, special content, or an in-app merch store can become additional monetization sources.

Fan Base Expansion

There’s no more motivated promoter for a sports team than an ecstatic fan. You can introduce gamification by collecting bonuses for new members, make special offers like limited team merch, or any other activity to stimulate your fan app users to popularize the team along with their own achievements and share the application itself. 

Enhanced Loyalty

Immersive experiences, real-time updates, exclusive content, inside references, and other online activities enabled with technology innovations create a feeling of belonging and a strong emotional attachment of sports fans to their favorite teams and athletes. And it is a well-known fact for marketers and brand managers that emotional connections help build strong and durable bonds with your audience.

What Features are Popular in Fan Engagement Apps?

Sports fan engagement solutions are designed to keep your sports organization at the center of people’s attention. This can be achieved through features that constantly source new information, provoke social interactions, and make calls to action. In this section, we list these features.

Real-Time Updates

Sports fans crave real-time information about match statistics, scores, and player data related to their favorites, especially when not able to watch the event live or be present at the venue. 

Live Streaming

With this feature, you’ll grant your team’s fans with the privilege of watching its live match broadcasts using your app, without needing to purchase subscriptions on streaming platforms and other third-party content providers.

Exclusive Content

To keep your sports club’s fans engaged even outside of important events, you can provide them with behind-the-scenes footage, special interviews and conferences, visualizations, or data-driven match analysis and stats from subject matter experts, as well as casual real-life photos and videos of your stars.  

Interactive Content

Sports fans enjoy sharing their opinion and debating with other people like them. Introduce live polls, quizzes, and open discussions to keep your application users more involved and make them generate content for you during and outside of matches or tournaments. Also, this is a great way to collect their feedback and adjust the promo activities accordingly.

Personalization

Let your users set up their preferences like favorite players, teams, leagues, etc., to get updates only on what interests them. This shows you don’t want to flood your fans with random content, but aim at creating personalized and pleasant experiences from interacting with your app. 

Online Chat

One of the special experiences your sports club’s fans can have within your app is building connections with like-minded people. You can turn your sports app into a happy place by building a friendly and supportive community through chat rooms, forums, and even social media integrations. Also, you can enable a form of communication with the team, like Q&A sessions or question boxes, bringing it closer to its fans. 

Online Store

Augment your merchandise sales by going beyond offline stores or situational sales during events. Having integrated your store into the app, you can become available to your fans 24/7, organize and run exclusive promo campaigns, and automate the sales process. Also, with an online store, you can add digital merch that your techie fans will appreciate.

Gamification

Being the most interesting and creative part of a fan engagement application, various leaderboards, achievements, and challenges bring on the competitive spirit and let your fans flex their knowledge and skills related to their favorite team and feel like stars too. Thus, gamification urges users to check on their results more often, increasing the interaction rate with your platform and boosting its popularity and rating on the app market.

How Axon Created a Fan Engagement App for Connected Fanatics

Axon has an extensive portfolio of sports and user engagement applications created for clients. Our most recent and innovative solution of this kind was the mobile application we developed for our client, Connected Fanatics. 

The Idea

Connected Fanatics is a group of sports and technology professionals who focus on creating environmentally friendly merchandise collection practices and healthy, abuse-free social interactions. Thus, their idea was to enable sports organizations (the rightholders) to turn their physical merchandise, for example, branded club jerseys, into an access point to the special digital locker. This digital locker will serve as a touchpoint with sports fans, providing them with exclusive content and a safe communication platform.

The Lockeroom

Native Android and iOS mobile applications served as the basis for the fan engagement platform, with the Lokeroom as the core product feature, complemented with the community, clubhouse, and matchday features:

• The digital locker enables fans to store and demonstrate the digital twins of their physical connected merchandise, creating personal profiles and befriending other fans in a social media-like manner. 
• The community provides a hate-free, moderated space for interaction between athletes and their verified, seasoned followers, bringing about more focused, real, respectful and safer conversations than those on social media.
• The clubhouse and matchday features provide users with exclusive content from their team in an aggregated news feed and even more special, live updates on matchdays.

The solution’s core, though, revolved around establishing a way in which the physical items would unlock access to the digital locker securely and with minimum effort. The choice fell to the use of NFC technology. Special NFC tags are placed on the merchandise items so that an apparel owner could tap their NFC-enabled device on it and instantly get access to the fan app with exclusive content and communication with athletes on the team as well as fellow fans.

NFC in the Connected Fanatics’ Fan Engagement App

NFC stands for near-field communication and denotes a set of communication protocols that enable data exchange between two devices over a short distance (4 centimetres or less). Providing low-speed wireless connectivity, it can serve for sharing small payloads of data, such as mobile payments, identity verification, public transport ticketing, photos, contact info, etc.

If one of the devices is a tag, like in our case, it commonly supports simple read-and-write capabilities. As the CTO at Connected Fanatics, Paul Lyons shared in our episode of the Axon podcast with him, their team got inspired by the application of NFC tags for clothing stock control. So they came up with various ideas of using this technology in sports merch – to track jerseys for fans, see their match attendance, record event-related memories, and so on. Eventually, this grew into the concept of a comprehensive fan engagement platform centered around NFC. 

As Paul explained, the NFC technology helped them ensure several important aspects of their fan engagement conception:

• Authenticity. Each NFC tag is made unique by writing reference data to its memory, making it impossible to create counterfeit apparel. Thus, fans can identify genuine sports club merchandize.
• Security. An NFC tag is a more secure identifier, as compared to other available identification technologies such as RFID tags or QR codes, which can be tracked and scanned at a distance or copied. Plus, they can be washed safely multiple times.
• Value. The NFC tag on a piece of clothing or other merchandize functions as a key to the digital locker that lets the item holder into the exclusive world of special content from their team and communication. Plus, this tag marks the physical item itself as unique and genuine.
• Recordability. Club fans can not just associate the club’s merch item they wear with the event where they wear it, but record their memories of this event–photos and videos–using the tag. Later, upon tapping the tag, they will be able to view them.

Moreover, there are other digital possibilities the the NFC technology may provide and the creators of this app are considering them for future versions. For example, NFC tags would also enable teams to see the life of their merch items and how fans celebrate their achievements. Or, having merch with a unique NFC tag, fans could use it as their digital ticket to sign into events. Finally, in combination with blockchain technology, the physical clothing items could get NFTs (non-fungible tokens) associated with them, increasing their value in the digital world.  

Digital Twins 

A digital twin is a very accurate digital model of a real-world physical object or process. It is particularly useful in domains that can benefit from simulations, such as engineering, design, manufacturing, or scientific research. Designed to not only look like their physical counterparts but to behave and respond to stimuli in the same way, digital twins help people save the precious time and resources.  

In the context of digital interactions in entertainment, digital twins create a way to represent our real-world assets as digital collectibles, too. In the Connected Fanatics’ app, once a jersey owner scans the tag with their device, they unlock the digital twin of their item in the mobile app. So, at this point, users can show off their collection of club merch to other fans. But this has the potential to grow into an opportunity for their avatar to wear their digital jersey in the metaverse, bringing about new, more immersive experiences. Blending in NFTs, we can make the value of these digital twins even more tangible.

Infrastructure As Code

On this project, Axon’s engineers relied on the infrastructure as code approach. With infrastructure as code (IaC), the computing infrastructure is provisioned using code and machine-readable files, as opposed to manual, interactive configuration tools. In modern software development, IaC is one of the best DevOps practices and a key part of continuous delivery as it helps to solve the issue of environment drift in release pipelines. This helps avoid code discrepancies and streamline the development process, ensuring timely and clean delivery for the client.

This approach requires solid engineering expertise in building infrastructure within a specific platform, but eventually yields very high-quality results when properly managed. Also, as another challenge, IaC takes more time for initial setup and getting roles and permissions correct, but when CI/CD pipeline is set up, it enables much easier introduction of new services at the development stages that follow.

Other benefits of having infrastructure as code on your project include:

• Security and auditability: you can audit your deployment before it gets deployed, bringing you more confidence about code security.
• Reliability: infrastructure as code is hard to break by adding new lambdas or services.
• Repeatability: with always reproducible environments of IaC, you know you can recreate an environment, be it development, testing, staging, or production, every time it is deployed.
• IaC is an important step towards implementing the cloud-native approach on a project.

Client’s Feedback

“From where we started, the product and what we were able to do with it, has progressed immensely.” 
Paul Lyons, CTO at Connected Fanatics

Commenting on the project success from their perspective, the client mentioned several achievements they could reach with the help of Axon’s team:

• An impressive level of mutual understanding from the first conversation with the pre-sales team–and throughout the entire project–fueled by professionalism, genuine interest, and imagination.
• Open and timely communication with the development  team during the entire development cycle.
• The launch of the merch (club jerseys) with the NFC tags to the real public.
• Positive reviews on the app, with fans being happy about the experiences they have unlocked using it.
• Ability to move forward with the project implementation at a right pace, getting the needed guidance in terms of technology and user interactions.

Conclusion

Fan engagement software is by all means a promising and rewarding method of building trust and loyalty with target audiences for sports organizations. Modern technologies, such as NFC, blockchain, AR and VR help teams and athletes create stronger bonds with their fans through immersive experiences, exclusive offers, continuous contact, and personalization. The sense of belonging and participating, from any part of the world,  in important sports events associated with favorite teams and athletes drive long-term and, what is most important, genuine support from fans.

Axon’s client Connected Fanatics came in with an idea to transform the fans’ experience of owning their club’s merchandise relying on the NFC technology and the concept of digital twins. The secret to success turned out to be in the mix of the client’s outstanding idea and desire to bring real value to their users and our engineers’ invested approach to this collaboration. 

If this story inspired you for a new compelling project, we will be more than happy to hear you out and help bring another great software product to life!

‍