FC Cincinnati’s Agentic Transformation - One Fan at a Time

FC Cincinnati sells out every game, but a full stadium doesn't always mean you know your fans. This MLS soccer club was sitting on a gold mine of fan data with no way of using it until Data360 gave them a whole new game plan. To walk us through their playbook, I'm joined by VP of Marketing Laura Wright and SVP of Business Strategy Dave Sladek. Welcome, welcome to Connections.

Welcome. Thank you.

Thanks for having us. Yeah, of course. I'm so happy to be here with you. I know we've chatted a little bit, but let's get into some of the details. So Laura, before Data360, if you can think back that far, what parts of your fan picture were unclear or out of your reach?

Yes, thank you. So as you said, we are sitting on a goldmine of data. We know a lot about what our fans look like demographically, but the big missing piece for us is what are our fans doing from a behavior standpoint and what are their wants and needs with FC Cincinnati as an MLS club? Yeah. We grew super fast. We just celebrated our first decade as a club. Amazing. And as we were growing, not just our fan base, we are also growing our product offering. So we're not just a soccer club where you can come watch us 17 times a year. We also have youth events, youth camps. We have a foundation. We have private events at the stadium as well as big concerts.

So we have— It's a community.

It is amazing. Yeah. Cincinnati's amazing. So lots of data coming in. We did some segmentation last year and we learned that 75% of our database come to one or less MLS match a year at our stadium.

Oh, wow.

So historically, we have talked to our fans all the same way as if they're raving fans and they want to know everything about our roster moves, X's and O's of the game.

Of course.

When in fact it might just be someone looking to donate their child's soccer cleats. So we're now able to speak one-to-one with our fans instead of one-to-many.

Yeah, that's tremendous value.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really exciting. The sky's the limit. We're just getting started.

I love that. It's really fascinating when you tap into the data. Yes. And begin that segmentation process. Dave, you moved from a data environment where you didn't own the architecture. Correct. What did implementing Data360 unlock for the organization?

You know, implementing Data360 really allowed us to empower our staff. You know, a lot of this technology is about making sure we reach our fans where we want, where they're at, as Laura mentioned. But having Data360 empowered both the marketing, ticketing, partnerships, and the entire organization to have access to data that wasn't in this black box that only the business analytics team had access to. So prior to Data360, if you wanted to reach out and just reach to our current season ticket members or just the people who came to the last game, you were sending an email to somebody who was exporting an Excel spreadsheet and it's boring. And I think—

That's a good way of putting it.

Well, and if you're a staff member in their earliest part of their career, like, they don't find joy in exporting Excel files and sending them, right?

That's a really excellent point. Yeah.

So for our staff, they're like, oh my gosh, I have access to all this data that's from all these different systems that, as Laura mentioned, 10 years old as a soccer club, 7 in the MLS. And really at the end of the day, we had all this data, wasn't connected. We couldn't look at our fans. We had point solutions and we weren't really trying to figure out what our fans needed. And this is just letting everybody see that data in such a different way.

You brought up such an excellent point just by saying it was boring because I think I think something that we don't always take into consideration is how are our team members within our company, how are they showing up for work and how are they being inspired? And so if you're submitting a request and you're waiting days, weeks on end to deliver the data, that doesn't, that doesn't always make you feel very empowered or inspired. Not at all. That's a really excellent point. Thank you for sharing that. I wanna dig into that a little bit more. So what does a unified fan profile look like in practice? What's stitched together and what decisions does that drive?

Yeah, so we are a startup essentially at the end of the day. We've been here, been for 10 years. And so we have, as I mentioned a second ago, a bunch of point solutions. We went out and bought something to serve a need right then. Yeah. And then we didn't think about the larger strategy. We didn't think about the business outcomes we were trying to achieve. We are more than a soccer team. We have all this other stuff that we want to do, but we want to bring in how they're interacting with us on their website. Do they go to youth camps? Do they go to watch parties? Can we get them to go to one of our single events that might be off of a match day? Like there's lots of revenue opportunities beyond just buy a ticket.

Come to the game.

Come to the game. Exactly.

Right? Like, so we think beyond the match day. And so in order to think beyond the match day, we have to have that data from all those other systems. And so bringing them together allows us to build that customer, the view of the customer. And I think about a perfect example. We now with Data360, when we send out a survey, to our fans after the game, if there's somebody that's a detractor, that's immediately pushing to our rep who can immediately reach out to them and address them. So like it's just freeing up our ability to do everything and ultimately scale beyond what we want to do.

And at tremendous speed.

Yeah, at total speed, like immediately.

Exactly.

It's so much faster.

That's so cool. I love this story more and more now that we're talking.

It's a lot of fun.

So Laura, let's talk about the day-to-day operations for your marketing team. What's changed? What's automated now that used to be manual? It sounds like a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. So just reflecting back, June 2026 to where we were in June 2025, we're in the process of finishing up our mid-year reviews and the conversations with the team are just drastically different. Really? So last year our email marketing coordinator was spending 3 to 4 hours deploying one email and we send 2 to 3 every day out of our system. Oh, wow. So we have now, with the help of Data 360, been able, and Data Cloud, we've been able to cut that time in half. So it looks like a lot of manual processes. She was working with 3 different departments, tracking down spreadsheets that were passed 3 to 4 different people, which opens up so much opportunity for error. And hoping.

Yeah, hoping we get it right in the process.

And so many mistakes were made by nobody's fault.

I didn't always get it right.

No, I get that. I get that.

There were mistakes.

For sure.

Yeah, we didn't. So now we have the opportunity to talk about how do we develop a proper fan journey and what is the content strategy for that fan journey. So it's a much more strategic conversation in terms of employee engagement. They're so much happier operating this way than—

I'm sure.

—in a chaotic, what has been a chaotic environment historically. So we've made so much progress in a year and I'm so glad we started.

Yeah, well, that's amazing. And also a tribute to the leadership too, to say we're going to make these significant changes and it's not only going to help our customers, but it's also going to improve our operations as an organization, which is fantastic.

And your point about leadership, just to chime in there, like we had buy-in from the CEO down. This was not just a marketing thing.

And that is so critical. And it was very important.

Leadership was bought on. It was just a strategic initiative for the year. So it was really good from that standpoint.

Excellent. Okay, so this is a question for both of you because I think that you can chime in with different perspectives here. Was anything harder than expected? Yeah. And anything you wish that you knew on the onset that you actually had to learn along the way?

Change is really hard. Yes. Just in general. This was a huge organizational shift, as Dave spoke to, for our team. I think bringing people along the way, along the journey, we did a really good job of that. But then when it came down to implementation, it's like, oh, we're going, like, this is happening. We're here. And it was also the start of our season earlier in the year. So it felt very chaotic.

I even myself, you know, had to be talked off the ledge a couple of times as a leader.

But I think continuing to remember the why and now reflecting back and looking at how far we've come and how much better we're able to operate and use our brains instead of problem solving is really tremendous. Yeah, that's really good.

What would you say, David?

Yeah, I think her point about change management is really important. This is digital transformation and yes, we bought a tech stack and yes, this tech stack allows us to do everything we want, but we brought the people along.

Everybody has to be on board.

And we had to create new processes. So it was the mix of all three. So like, I think as we look at what we could have done sooner is just reminding people like, this is the light at the end of the tunnel. I think about something that just happened this past week where we did something that we couldn't have done a year ago. Yeah. And like the light bulbs went off in these people's heads and you could see it. They're like, oh my gosh, this is so much simpler.

Because it's a whole new way of operating. Yes. It's a whole new way of thinking.

It's so much better.

Yeah. And so that shift sounds like it's it's already happened. So the change management can always be a little tricky, but once everybody starts to understand and see the light at the end of the tunnel, then you have an operation that's functioning at a completely different speed in a, in a completely different way. 100% agree. Um, okay, so thinking ahead, what can FC Cincinnati fans expect to see in the future? What do you have lined up?

I think FC fans in the future can see us expand beyond just the match day like we talked about. We have a mixed-use development that's going to go in above north of the stadium. So we're going to have a hotel, apartments, all this fun stuff to engage with. So we'll be able to reach them differently. Hopefully having new teams, we are always looking to expand into other ventures. So that could be fun. But this foundation we have will allow us to scale and allow our staff to hopefully build agents and eventually be able to reach those people really quickly.

Well, that's fantastic. I love this. Sounds like you guys are doing some tremendous things at FC Cincinnati. I can't wait to see where you guys take it from here. Laura and Dave, thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time at Connections. And thank you. We're excited to continue to root for FC Cincinnati both on and off the field. To start your Data360 journey today, check out the resources on the screen. Scan the QR code to join the DataBlazer community.