Now is the time of year NFL fans start to get excited about the upcoming season. The successes and failures of last year are already forgotten. The 2018 schedule came out in mid-April, the draft took place a week later, and preseason games kick off in less than two months. Teams have new players, some have new coaches, and fans have new hope.
Calendar app Stanza is aiming to help those teams engage that fan excitement not just for the 16 big game days to come this fall, but through the rest of the year, too. The brainchild of Stanford grad Smita Saxena, the app has already found a loyal client in the locally based San Francisco 49ers. Sitting in the heart of Silicon Valley, the 49ers have embraced the local tech scene, and Stanza was on their radar from its inception five years ago.
“Staying close to our fans, not just during the season but throughout the year, is one of the big initiatives and focus, not just for us, but the league, and sports as a whole,” said Brano Perkovich, the team’s Chief Investment Officer. “Part of what I do is stay on top of Silicon Valley, all innovation, and make sure we identify all the innovation that’s happening around us. Smita was solving a problem that we thought had an interesting application to us. We’re always looking for innovative ways to engage with fans. One of insights she had that resonated with me early on: If you think about your phone, all your apps, one app is always on your home screen, and that’s your calendar, and calendars have not been innovated on.”
That quality, Perkovich said, really piqued his interest.
“If you look at how we’ve integrated them into our new platform, we’ve been one of the first NFL teams really focusing on this whole mobile-first strategy,” Perkovich said. “Fans continue to get information from mobile. We’ve created our paper schedule so our fans can download and print out, but increasingly, our fans are mobile natives. Folks who’ve never lived without a smartphone in their hand. That’s the trend: being able to serve a calendar in a smart way, add specific events, offer our Web site. Stanza provides a very simple but very powerful ability. It’s about being able to serve relevant information.”
After an initial test deployment, which Perkovich said was very quick, the 49ers integrated Stanza across all their media channels.
Stanza’s Alex Fitschen said teams are seeing an uptick in ticket and merchandise purchasing through the calendar add-on, as Stanza allows fans to be clued into team events 365 days a year.
“Around the schedule release date, most of our fans start to sync up game-day calendars,” Perkovich said. “There are lot of opportunities to use Stanza to stay connected, and not just around the schedule. We’re really thinking about all the community events, the state of the franchise events, draft parties. There are a lot of things we do. We don’t just stop operating in the summer.”
Most importantly, Stanza allows the 49ers to tailor their message to specific fans based on their availability and interest.
“We certainly try to take a strategic view with the communication we have with our fans,” Perkovich said. “We know they have different ways to consume content. It’s on us as an organization to make sure we’re top of mind. I mean, our big competition is the couch. It ties back to the 12-month cycle. Game content is very important, the center of everything we do. But there is a lot of content outside of the game that’s very valuable. Within the 49ers, we’ve built out a full team that has created its own content. Really revolved around interviews and coverage of various events that we organize with our fans.”
Fox Sports Wisconsin digital content manager Dave Heller called Stanza “unobtrusive” and said the user-friendly platform has helped increased revenue from his website, with minimal work for content producers.
“I feel this is a great user experience,” he said. “Fans can come to us, and if they see a (Milwaukee) Brewers game in the calendar, they can mark it directly and it’s ready to go.”