What’s your name and position within the organisation?
Jim Daigle – Founder and CEO of Sports Systems
Tell us a little about Sports Systems
We simplify and enhance invitation-only events for many ESA member agencies and their brand clients through our proprietary guest invitation, registration and management technology. We are already delivering these guest management systems updated to fulfill GDPR for our clients with summer events. For larger sponsorship projects, we work with the agency to create internal websites for the brand that promote the sponsorship and the ticket, merchandise, image, experience and other assets available through that partnership; this website usually includes an asset booking tool and even image rights management submissions and approvals.
We simplify and enhance invitation-only events
What are the current trends within your business area, and how are they affecting how you work and how you deliver on strategy?
GDPR is forcing large, fundamental changes across event activation to all events, from experiential, to those that we focus on – guest hospitality events.
I wish that I could answer that some new technology is driving trends in event hospitality, but the real answer is GDPR. GDPR is forcing large, fundamental changes across event activation to all events, from experiential, to those that we focus on – guest hospitality events. It has become part of every conversation, and, to help our clients, we are taking great measures to ensure that we are fully informed and supporting our clients’ operational changes to assure GDPR compliance. The impact on our industry is massive because all data collection, storage and processing from and about EU residents is directly impacted, from fan clubs to ticket sales, and from event accreditation to VIP guests.
What is most clear is that GDPR is absolutely not optional, with penalties for non-compliance that reach 20 Million Euros or 4% of worldwide turnover, whichever is greater – potentially career-ending and company-closing penalties! So, with the 25 May 2018 in-force date looming, every single person in our industry should be asking how this affects each of our roles and responsibilities because compliance truly affects everyone, and for most is not a quick or easy change.
My biggest lesson is that a foundational component of GDPR, namely securing the consent of the person whose data is collected, cannot be relied on in our work with event invitations. Consent is not truly given freely as the law requires when the person cannot accept an event invitation without supplying the required personal information. So for our work, to comply with GDPR, our law firm has directed us to use a different legal basis for collecting and processing the data required by our clients.
Some of the misconceptions I have heard about GDPR include that data collected before 25 May is exempt, that UK companies are exempt thanks to Brexit, that agencies, teams or events under 250 employees are exempt, and that events using standard emails to collect data and Excel to manage personal data can safely continue to operate this way — all of these are absolutely and totally wrong.
However, looking at GDPR from an alternate point of view, it is not necessary to see this law singularly as an expensive and difficult new government requirement, but instead to appreciate that protecting the personal data has long been a fundamental business requirement that relatively is only changing modestly, so it is possible to focus on new trust being built in vendor relationships and to look positively on the benefits to EU residents. (EU residents are gaining extensive rights to the protection of their personal data, which can mean control over how and where data is collected about them, and the right to access, amend and delete much of the data held now and to be collected about them in the future, depending on circumstances).
Can you tell us which of your recent projects has been of most interest to you and why?
We simplify data management, and two recent projects we are particularly proud of for fulfilling more advanced client needs are:
A favourite system, built for a top UEFA partner, has the brand exporting a list of high-value customers from its CRM system, with more customers than it has tickets for each game, and our GuestFirst system invites exactly for the tickets available, automatically issuing a new invitation to the next priority customer only when another customer declines or does not reply to an invitation in the allotted time. The result is that nearly all tickets are used, in business value priority order, so agency time and staffing requirements are reduced and upgraded to supervisory responsibilities instead of the usual manual administrative responsibilities and time.
Our system allows each manager to generate personalised invitations to their guests and to oversee those guests’ replies
The second recent project was supporting Infrared’s activation of Old Mutual Wealth’s sponsorship of England Rugby. We developed an extension to our host invitation guest management system that gives easy, direct control for exact seating to the line managers that actually know where specific guests should be best seated. Rather than having each group submit guest lists to the agency, our system allows each manager to generate personalised invitations to their guests and to oversee those guests’ replies. The new extension gives that same manager a graphical seating chart with the specific seats allocated to their group and the easy ability to select an exact seat for each of their guests.
How has sponsorship changed in your industry over the past few years? And how do you think it’s going to change in the next five years?
In-person relationship building is fundamental to business success, and the great advantage of our industry is the widespread appeal and proven success of using sports events to drive building relationships outside of the office.
Our primary area of sponsorship activation, high-value guest hospitality, has certainly rebounded from the 2008+ financial services recession, and has overcome the uncertainty created by the UK and other anti-bribery regulations. In the end, in-person relationship building is fundamental to business success, and the great advantage of our industry is the widespread appeal and proven success of using sports events to drive building relationships outside of the office. Therefore, regulations and compliance mandates can affect sports event hospitality in the short term, but in the long-term, the business value is recognised and event hospitality will continue to thrive.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We appreciate the important role ESA plays as a platform to learn from peers and other experts toward improving our business and the industry in general – we’re proud to be members.