Building a Fan360 Solution – Minnesota Vikings

Before:

Lack of Results from Fan Data Management

The Minnesota Vikings’ data and analytics team recognized that their fanbase was one of the team’s greatest assets. Knowing this, they embarked on an ambitious project to create a comprehensive Fan360 solution. This initiative aimed to consolidate fan data from various sources, providing a holistic view of their fanbase and enabling more personalized engagement. As a result, the Vikings would be able to truly know their fans, from their favorite players to their preferred concessions, allowing them to tailor their marketing outreach accordingly and monetize their fan base more effectively.

Unfortunately, the Minnesota Vikings struggled to achieve the level of customization they needed from their existing systems, and they were unable to effectively ingest new data from another company that effectively owned their data warehouse. The Vikings needed a modern data stack that they could own which would allow for greater flexibility, faster response times, and the ability to ingest data from multiple sources. To expedite this process and optimize their fan data utilization, they engaged Spaulding Ridge for collaboration.

Solution:

Enhancing Data Ingestion and Fan Engagement

The work was completed in several stages over the course of two years, each focusing on specific data sources and capabilities. Our full solution contained the following components:

1. Data Warehouse: A single place where data could be stored and analyzed under the Vikings’ control, enabling a single source of truth for fan data. Spaulding Ridge utilized Snowflake for scalable and efficient data storage and analysis.
2. Extract Transform and Load Process: A system for pulling data from structured and unstructured sources to prepare it for ingestion. We leveraged Matillion for data transformation and loading.
3. Data Ingestion: Pipelines to ingest data from various sources, including but not limited to:
   •  Ticketing
   •  Email
   •  Merchandise (e-commerce and brick-and-mortar)
   •  Mobile app
   •  Social media analytics
   •  SMS messaging
4. Identity Resolution (IDR/Fan360): A process by which fan data could be unified and individuals could be clearly tied to all of their interactions with the team, providing a “golden record” of each fan across all touchpoints.
5. GDPR Compliance: To ensure the Vikings could provide tailored fan experiences to their growing community of international fans, we established a separate EU-compliant data stack.

Fan360 Solution

Following our discovery work, we began the project by implementing the modern data stack implementation. Our main focus was to review and document 11 different data sources that the Vikings needed to feed into their new data warehouse. This allowed us to identify potential issues with data sources, significantly reduce delays in system setup needed with third party vendors (i.e. API key generation or file transfer approvals) and lay the groundwork for the ingestion processes. This phase also included setting up the Vikings’ Snowflake and Matillion instances for data ETL to prepare the team to start ingesting data.

The second phase of work is where the Vikings truly began to see their vision come to life. In this phase, we ingested the first five key data sources the team needed for Fan360 that gave us information on ticketing, merchandise, digital, and food and beverage with personally identifiable information (PII) for each, allowing us to create a golden record for each fan.

With key data now in the warehouse, we began building the Fan360 solution. We implemented the IDR tool for matching and data enrichment, working with the client to come up with matching logic and winning priority for the data sources to make sure they were getting an accurate view of each of their unique fans. After QA and validation, we built a writeback process to their email and omnichannel marketing tool so that their CRM system would have the same unified view of each fan as the data warehouse.

From there, we helped the Vikings ingest additional data sources (both active and historical sources) and incorporate that data into their IDR solution. We then set up ingestion pipelines for mobile app data and social media data, which helped the Vikings to conduct user-based testing on fan preferences, ultimately enhancing the fan experience. The change also allowed their analytics and strategy team to support their entertainment unit, previously the only department not backed by data. The implementation introduced dynamic reporting, shedding more light on the entertainment unit’s work, tracking live events, and making real-time adjustments (e.g., merchandise sales, ticketing, database growth).

International Expansion and AI Capabilities

After building out their data stack and creating a Fan360 solution for their US fanbase, the Vikings then turned their eyes to capturing a new fan base with their upcoming international game in London. About nine months prior to their October 6th game, we built out a GDPR-compliant data stack in the EU region and completed discovery on how best to implement the IDR/Fan360 solution while also maintaining GDPR compliance.

While our initial plan included using the same IDR tool as the US stack, we ultimately proposed an internal IDR solution that utilized AI functionality. We leveraged Snowflake’s Cortex capabilities to create an IDR solution fully contained within the Snowflake platform to ensure robust data management and GDPR compliance through:

• Customer Vector Creation: We developed algorithms to associate words/characters with numerical values for efficient comparison
• Comparison Framework: We established processing guidelines and utilized cosine similarity to identify closely related customers
• Flexible Rule Engine: We implemented compound, individual, and staked rule comparisons.

To enhance usability, we developed a custom Streamlit app that provides an intuitive interface for creating rules, managing comparisons, and visualizing the IDR process, making the solution accessible to both technical and non-technical users across the Vikings’ organization.

Currently, we are implementing a writeback process to update their email tool with new and modified contact information from the IDR process. This will enable the Vikings to gather more data on their international fanbase and effectively market to them, expanding their global reach.