Purdue University is planning significant renovations to its football stadium, but doesn’t yet know what that re-design might look like. To determine exactly what changes are needed, the Boilermakers are teaming up with Elevate Sports Ventures to seek out the thoughts and advice of fans.
Elevate Sports Ventures was formed from a partnership between the San Francisco 49ers and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment last year, and has since added additional partners including Ticketmaster, Live Nation, and Oak View Group. It focuses on providing a data-driven approach to boosting the success of sports and entertainment properties, perhaps best exemplified by how the 49ers monitor and use fan data.
In recent years, San Francisco has conducted 30,000 fan surveys annually, 20,000 end-of-season surveys per year, and through HappyorNot terminals in Levi’s Stadium, has collected 200,000 real-time alerts on fan happiness during each season. That has contributed to more than $10 million spent on enhancements.
When Purdue traveled to Levi’s Stadium to play Arizona in the 2017 Foster Farms Bowl, the athletics department staff had a chance to see what the 49ers were doing to leverage fans’ insights to affect game-day operations and to boost revenue. Long after the Boilermakers 38-35 victory over the Wildcats, the Purdue staff remained intrigued by what they had seen.
“We just kept in touch throughout all 2018, talking about different data initiatives and different ways to use analytics to drive strategy,” said Tom Moreland, associate athletics director for strategic initiatives at Purdue. “A lot of the groundbreaking things that they’re doing at the 49ers.”
When the Boilermakers began planning for major redesigns at Ross-Ade with architecture firm Populus, the athletics staff thought back to the 49ers approach to seeking and leveraging fan insights. “We sat down in that design room with Populus and we said ‘You know what? We think we might know what we need, and there’s definitely some area where we think we can improve it, but let’s ask our fan base.'”
“We want a fan-centric design,” Moreland says. “We want a design that’s influenced by our fans’ input, that’s influenced by the information our fans give us.”
So Purdue enlisted Elevate to help run a giant study of what its fans want. That study will include tens of thousands of surveys, and hundreds of interviews. Participants will range from season ticket holders and alumni to current students, and will be drawn from an area stretching beyond both Indianapolis and Chicago. Though the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears are pro teams rather than college, they are perhaps two of Purdue’s biggest rivals in terms of attracting football fans to games.
A key part of the survey methodology involves using a conjoint analysis. This can reveal hidden rules that people might use when making decisions by offering questions where the answers contain multiple attributes.
“A conjoint analysis is perfect for this study, because it closely resembles how customers actually make purchase decisions; comparing bundles of features of varying products,” wrote Moon Javaid, VP of strategy for Elevate Sports Ventures—and VP of strategy and analytics for the San Francisco 49ers—in an email to SportTechie. “By understanding how customers make trade-offs between options, we are truly able to understand which attributes of products customers prefer, for example, ‘Would you prefer mango ice cream for $2.50 or strawberry ice cream at $2.25?'”
In this example, the survey is considering not just whether mango might be a more popular flavor than strawberry, but also how much price may affect a person’s decision.
“Conjoint analysis has been the preferred approach leveraged by leading brands and Fortune 500 companies across industries when evaluating new products, and it’s about time this approach is used in sports,” Javaid explained. “We believe that this approach will absolutely be used in the sports and entertainment industry moving forward.”
According to Moreland, the fan surveys will be run this winter and spring, and the design process based on those results will take place this summer. “That’s when we sit down with our donor base and ask them to support the project,” he says.
In 2016, Purdue’s average home attendance was 34,451. Last year that jumped to 51,120. Part of the reason why might lie in the football team’s on-field success—it won just nine games from 2013 to 2015, but has reached back-to-back bowl games the last two seasons. But Moreland and the Boilermakers staff are hoping that through appealing to fans to help plan the upcoming redesign, Purdue can continue that attendance growth, and the revenue boost that comes with it.