Growing Sports Communities through Geospatial: Australian Football League Case Study
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- Pacific
Country
- Australia
Product
- CARTO’s platform
- Liveli geospatial solution
Tech Stack
- Geospatial Analysis
- Data Visualization
- Data Integration
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The Australian Football League (AFL) is the pre-eminent and only fully professional men's competition of Australian rules football. The league currently consists of 18 teams spread over five of Australia's six states. In the AFL’s 2018 annual report, the organization shared statistics that showed that club membership had grown to over 1 million individuals (from 900,000 in 2017) - with record levels of female participation with 530,000 playing throughout the year. This means that 1 in every 24 Australians is a member of an AFL club. The AFL as an organization reported profits of $50.4 million in 2018 - showing the continued growth in appetite for the sport in and outside of Australia. Corporate sponsors include Toyota, Coca-Cola, Gatorade and many others who see the AFL as a unique platform to position their brands. The Australian Football League’s (AFL) Game Development Department has a focus on community facilities around Australia working with more than 2,500 community clubs. The Game Development Department aims to grow participation in the game and work with a variety of stakeholders including local and state governments and state football bodies to make expansion possible.
The Challenge
The Australian Football League (AFL) aims for around 3-4 percent growth in community engagement each year. Ensuring facilities are right in each area is an important aspect in attracting new players and retaining current players around Australia. Organisational effectiveness is important to ensure resources go to the right places. In each region, clubs and leagues make requests to the state and then to the national body for funding and the AFL must assess each application based on its merits. Local region managers are also required to make their case to local councils to obtain investment. Communicating the status of a region’s participation gives people on the ground the right starting information so they can take the right actions to improve participation. In the world of data driven decision making, the AFL needed a way to communicate quickly to local and state governments about their local needs. Communicating with local authorities using a standardised report that wasn’t tailored to a region made it more difficult to convey the AFL’s message.
The Solution
Using CARTO’s platform, Liveli were able to build a geospatial solution that made localised snapshotting of their data easy - with CARTO performing analysis on the fly to provide reports for the AFL. Liveli helped to structure their player and facility data, overlaying it with demographic information from the Census to inform each locality where they had good market penetration. This new system is now providing tailored information with the rapid turnaround that the AFL need to secure support and funding - with each regional manager having their own login. Now, each individual can see focussed regional information rather than a policy document. Liveli wanted to provide the AFL team with an intuitive and user-friendly solution that could be used by non-technical stakeholders across Australia to boost participation in the sport. CARTO made it simple to gather and connect to player, demographics and facility data using the platform’s Excel and Dropbox connectors for frequently updated data. CARTO also enables the seamless creation of simple and beautiful maps that could be understood by regional managers, AFL executive and public sector stakeholder - saving them resources so that they can focus on the job at hand.
Operational Impact
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