How to integrate vivenu ticketing data into Dotdigital
Reading time:
14 mins
Smaller professional sports organizations rarely lack ambition. More often, they lack the scale, specialist headcount, and margin for error of the biggest properties.
In this conversation, Katherine Rowe explains how clubs can build a focused revenue strategy around the audience they already have. From ticketing, partnerships, and customer data to prioritization, ownership, and operating cadence, she shows how smaller organizations can grow without trying to copy the structure of an elite team.
I normally start with the audience the organization already has. Smaller properties often assume they need more fans when the immediate opportunity is to better understand, engage, and monetize the fans already attending, watching, and interacting with the club.
Ticketing is usually the first place I look because there are often opportunities across pricing, packaging, premium experiences, retention, and group sales. From there, I look at partnerships. Many organizations are selling inventory rather than building opportunities around what partners actually value, such as access to a defined audience, content, community impact, or measurable engagement.
The common thread is data. Even relatively simple analysis of who is buying, how frequently they attend, what they respond to, and where they drop off can reveal opportunities that do not require a major investment. The biggest early wins often come from reducing leakage and increasing the value of existing relationships before spending heavily to acquire new audiences.
The first step is establishing an honest baseline. That means understanding where revenue currently comes from, how profitable each stream is, which audiences and partners are driving it, and where the organization may be overly dependent on a small number of relationships.
I would then assess the customer journey across ticketing, partnerships, hospitality, merchandise, media, and other commercial areas. The goal is to identify where demand exists but the organization is failing to capture it, whether because of pricing, packaging, limited inventory, poor communication, or a lack of internal ownership.
From there, each opportunity should be sized and prioritized based on its potential value, required investment, organizational capabilities, and speed to impact. A smaller organization cannot pursue everything at once, so I would normally select a few initiatives that can create near-term results while also building longer-term capabilities.
Finally, the strategy needs clear owners, timelines, and measures of success. Those measures should go beyond total revenue and include indicators such as retention, yield, conversion, revenue per customer, partner renewal, and pipeline health. The strategy should become part of a regular operating cadence, not a document that is reviewed once a year.
A smaller organization does not need to recreate the structure of a major league team. It needs clarity around its commercial priorities, a small number of capable people who can work across functions, and access to specialist expertise when it is genuinely required.
I would build the model around one commercial leader with visibility across the full revenue picture, supported by clear processes for ticketing, partnerships, marketing, and customer data. Roles can be broader, but ownership still needs to be explicit. Everyone should know who is responsible for the outcome, not simply who completes each task.
Specialist capabilities can then be added through technology partners, agencies, or fractional support rather than permanent hires in every discipline. The key is to keep strategy and institutional knowledge inside the organization. External partners should strengthen the team, not become the only people who understand how the commercial operation works.
The foundation should remain simple: reliable data, a shared view of the customer, disciplined sales processes, and a regular cadence for reviewing performance. Smaller organizations can often move faster than larger properties, but only if their limited resources are concentrated on the opportunities that matter most.
There is a tendency in professional sport to associate revenue growth with adding something new.
More fans. A new product. Another technology platform. A new commercial hire. A completely new revenue stream.
What I like about Katherine Rowe’s answers is that she starts somewhere much less glamorous, but probably much more useful:
What are you already sitting on?
For many smaller professional sports organizations, the first commercial opportunity may not be acquiring a much larger audience. There are already people attending games, buying tickets, following the club, purchasing merchandise, interacting with content, bringing friends, or engaging with partners.
The question is whether the organization understands those relationships well enough to extract their full value.
That changes how you approach a sports revenue strategy.
Instead of immediately asking, “How do we find more customers?”, you can first ask:
Who already buys from us?
How often?
What else could be relevant to them?
Where do we lose them?
Where is demand stronger than our current offer captures?
Katherine points to ticketing as an obvious starting point, and I think that makes a lot of sense.
Ticketing is not simply about selling more seats. Pricing, packaging, premium experiences, retention, group sales, and yield can all create meaningful upside without changing the size of the underlying audience.
That is an important distinction for non-elite professional sports.
A club with a stadium of 10,000 seats cannot suddenly become a property with the scale of a Champions League club. But it can become considerably better at monetizing the demand and relationships it already has.
The same logic applies to sponsorship.
Katherine describes the difference between selling inventory and building partnerships around what a brand actually values: access to a particular audience, content, community impact, or measurable engagement.
That moves the conversation away from simply attaching a price to assets.
A logo position has value, of course. But a stronger commercial proposition begins with understanding why a potential partner would want access to this particular club, this audience, and this community in the first place.
That is where fan data and commercial strategy start to meet.
Even fairly basic customer analysis can tell a sports organization a lot: who attends frequently, which products they buy, how different audience groups respond, when customers lapse, what drives renewal, and where revenue is leaking from the customer journey.
You do not necessarily need sophisticated predictive analytics to discover something commercially useful.
Sometimes the opportunity is hiding in an obvious place because nobody has looked at the data from the right angle.
Katherine’s framework for developing a revenue strategy is equally practical.
Start with an honest baseline.
Where does revenue actually come from?
Which revenue streams are profitable?
Which audiences and partners drive them?
How concentrated is the business?
Is the organization overly dependent on one sponsor, a handful of hospitality customers, or a particular ticketing segment?
That baseline matters because total revenue can hide quite a lot.
Two clubs with the same commercial revenue may have completely different levels of resilience, customer retention, pricing power, pipeline quality, and growth potential.
The next step is to look across the customer journey.
Ticketing.
Partnerships.
Hospitality.
Merchandise.
Media.
Other commercial products.
Where does demand exist, and where is the organization failing to capture it?
Maybe the problem is pricing.
Maybe the packaging is poor.
Maybe premium inventory is too limited.
Maybe people are interested but the communication does not reach them at the right moment.
Maybe nobody internally has clear ownership of the opportunity.
This is where revenue strategy becomes more useful than a generic list of growth ideas.
A smaller sports organization can easily identify twenty things it could improve.
It probably cannot execute twenty of them well.
So the real work is prioritization.
Katherine suggests evaluating opportunities against potential value, required investment, organizational capability, and speed to impact.
That creates a much better decision framework.
A high-upside idea that requires two years, a major technology project, and skills the organization does not possess may deserve a lower immediate priority than a smaller opportunity that can generate measurable revenue within three months.
This is particularly important for smaller professional clubs because resource allocation is part of the strategy itself.
The objective is not to replicate the commercial department of an elite sports property on a smaller budget.
That is likely to fail.
The objective is to design an operating model that fits the organization.
I particularly like Katherine’s point about having one commercial leader with visibility across the complete revenue picture.
Ticketing, partnerships, marketing, customer data, hospitality, and other functions still need clear ownership, but that does not mean every discipline requires its own specialist department.
Broader roles can work.
External expertise can work.
Technology partners, agencies, consultants, and fractional specialists can fill genuine capability gaps.
But there is an important condition in Katherine’s answer: strategy and institutional knowledge should remain inside the organization.
That is a subtle but important point.
External support becomes dangerous when the club itself no longer understands how its commercial engine works.
A good partner should make the internal team stronger, not create permanent dependency.
For me, this is one of the most relevant questions in sports commercial operations right now.
How much capability genuinely needs to sit in-house?
Where does specialist support create leverage?
And how do you build a commercial operating model that remains coherent when several internal and external people are contributing?
Katherine’s answer comes back to a surprisingly simple foundation:
Reliable data.
A shared view of the customer.
Disciplined sales processes.
Clear ownership.
And a regular cadence for reviewing performance.
That last point deserves more attention.
A revenue strategy should not be a presentation that gets approved in January and reopened when the next planning cycle begins.
It should influence how the commercial organization operates every week and every month.
That also means measuring more than total revenue.
Retention tells you whether relationships are lasting.
Yield tells you how effectively demand is being monetized.
Conversion shows whether interest becomes purchase.
Revenue per customer helps reveal whether existing relationships are deepening.
Partner renewal is a useful indication of whether sponsorship relationships are actually working.
Pipeline health gives a forward-looking view instead of waiting for the final revenue number.
These are the kinds of commercial KPIs that turn strategy into an operating system.
And that brings me back to the idea I found most useful across all three answers.
For smaller sports organizations, focus can itself be a competitive advantage.
Large properties have more people, more technology, more inventory, more data, and more money.
They also have more layers, more stakeholders, and often more complexity.
A smaller club cannot win by copying that infrastructure.
It can win by understanding its audience better, identifying a small number of high-value commercial opportunities, making decisions faster, and concentrating limited resources on execution.
That is a much more credible approach to revenue growth in professional sport.
Start with the audience you already have.
Understand the economics of the existing business.
Find where demand or revenue is leaking.
Size the opportunities.
Choose a few that genuinely matter.
Give somebody ownership.
Measure whether they work.
Then build from there.
For anyone thinking about sports revenue strategy, ticketing strategy, sponsorship revenue, fan data, sports CRM, commercial operations, customer retention, hospitality revenue, pricing, revenue per fan, partner renewal, or data-driven decision-making in professional sport, Katherine’s answers provide a useful framework.
Growth does not always require a bigger audience or a bigger department.
Sometimes it starts with running the commercial operation you already have much better.
