To celebrate the 60th anniversary of its flagship competition UEFA changed the structure of EURO 2020, appointing matches to Host Cities across Europe instead of a single Host Country. The mission was to bring football to the fans, engaging a new audience and delivering a best-in-class experience to their doorstep. To achieve this vision our business was facing a number of critical challenges, requiring a new approach to the way we engaged fans at our events.

The first challenge was selling the requirement for strategic change internally. EURO matches regularly sell-out, benefiting from a fiercely loyal football audience, but analytics from recent events tell the story of a narrowing attendance profile; 80% male, an average age of close to 40 and a high average income.

Recognising the need to target a new audience was the starting point, however new audiences brought fresh challenges such as elevated fan expectation coupled with diminished fan loyalty and a demand for diversity of experience centred around engagement, community, and social values. With these challenges identified, our mission was to re-think the way our fans engaged with a EURO, re-building the fan journey by putting fan needs and values at its core.

For many fans the EUROs are a once in a lifetime opportunity. Our vision for the fan companion was to deliver a product that would optimise that experience, removing pain points and ensuring that regardless of your event knowledge all doors at EURO 2020 were open.

The idea was a personal companion that knew everything about the EURO and enough about you to surface only the most relevant, informative, and engaging content. Digital innovation was the key: The EUROs take place once every four years providing us with a development window to pick the most impactful technologies and apply them in a targeted and powerful way.

Finally, we knew that it couldn’t detract from the core experience of football and meeting other fans, which gave birth to the guiding principles of simplicity, accuracy and personalisation.

The objective of our strategy was to enhance the fan experience, remove pain points and drive operational efficiency. The building blocks to realise this included a cutting-edge data pipeline, advanced geo-location services and an all-encompassing channel management strategy.

Content was channelled to users via a ticket API, allowing us to provide bespoke matchday content and benefits (e.g. digital travelcard) based on ticketholder data. We worked with location data experts to fully harness the power of geo-location services, monitoring and measuring fan movements with unrivalled accuracy while ensuring GDPR compliance.

The result was a targeted and contextual push notifications strategy based on real-time fan journeys. We also used the data to deliver fan-facing engagement features such as interactive heatmaps.

Finally, we created a channel management strategy that followed the “single source of truth” principle. It meant working with +150 channel owners from 11 countries to drive people to the Fan Companion.

The Fan Companion was launched a month before the start of the tournament, in time for the final planning phases.

A custom journey planner allowed us to deliver a new level of accuracy, combining the best of Google Maps with tournament-specific info and functionality such as automatic routing to your stadium entrance. The objective of simplicity guided us in designing the digital travelcard. It provided ticketholders with free and seamless access to public transport, an industry first. The innovative “Volkswagen Chauffeur” was another delighter: a free, fully integrated Uber-style service, powered by an exclusively electric fleet. Intuitive and easy to use for fans, it added significant technical development complexity such as real-time driver information, booking engines etc.

True personalisation was achieved not just by location-based push messaging, but the hugely popular “Daily Tips” feed: Fun, bite-sized messages, surfacing only the most relevant and engaging content to fans throughout the tournament.

Based on an average ticket holder group size of between two and three fans, our KPI was to put the fan companion in the hands of one in every two ticket holders. This KPI was smashed throughout the tournament, with key markets such as London, Munich, Rome and Amsterdam delivering ticket holder download figures in excess of 80%. In total the number of unique users utilising the fan companion totalled 2.2 million.

With a push notification opt-in rate of 75% and an average session duration of 8:30 min, the fan companion demonstrated exceptionally high engagement rates. The journey planner alone had a total of 3.1 million views across the tournament period. The Volkswagen Free Chauffeur saw over 23,000 fans catching free rides.

The analytics are supported by the results of a post-tournament survey, revealing that 78% of ticket holders used the fan companion to support their fan journey.