Transforming fan engagement for a Premier League club

These bespoke, PHP content management systems were almost 10 years old and were showing their age. They posed challenges for editorial teams, were difficult for developer teams to update, and were preventing Arsenal from capitalising on the growing number of distribution channels and platforms favoured by its fans.

For editorial teams, simple processes like managing images and embedding videos were unnecessarily complicated, so asset management was a key pain point. Meanwhile, the legacy platforms were preventing Arsenal’s content team from integrating with other systems and developing application programming interfaces (APIs) to enhance the fan experience.

Arsenal recognised the need for a single, sustainable, and flexible CMS that would support its current and future business growth initiatives. The new platform would need to provide stability and a foundation for becoming more agile in the face of changing fan behaviours. And with mobile representing approximately 70% of Arsenal’s audience, optimising the website for a seamless mobile experience was key.

The club was looking for a cutting-edge, open-source platform that would optimise editorial workflows, be easy to integrate and develop, and would provide capabilities to enable future business growth.

With compelling case studies and experience in the sports industry, Inviqa and US-based agency Phase2 were selected as Arsenal’s partners to provide consultancy, as well as to implement and maintain the new platform.

Our support for Arsenal included:

• Discovery: workshops with key stakeholders to gain a deep understanding of the project goals and how success would be measured to help prioritise and inform decisions
• Drupal 8 customisation and implementation  
• Implementation of Gigya for single sign-on for social media and membership
• Implementation of a mobile-first design
• Platform-as-a-service approach with Platform.sh for simpler development and deployment workflows, as well as agile scaling to meet peak traffic

The all-new, Drupal-powered Arsenal.com provides the club with a bigger, bolder content hub that paves the way for deeper fan engagement and future business growth.

Key milestones include:

• 34% of fans now watching Arsenal-owned video content
• 15% year-on-year growth in digital membership sign-up
• 13% YOY increase in site users
• 4 second improvement for average page load
• 150,000 page views per month for the newly integrated membership section
• Awarded the 2018 People’s Voice Webby Award

Delivered on-time and without any disruption to the business, the new platform, built on Drupal 8 and Platform.sh, allows Arsenal to move faster in response to changing fan behaviours and continuously improve the experiences it delivers.

Arsenal.com was developed to be mobile-first, providing a stable and intuitive experience across multiple devices. Features like infinite scroll further enhance the mobile experience, while the decision to replace the legacy membership gateway with single-sign on powered by Gigya has simplified the user journey.

Content teams are now able to effortlessly create and publish engaging content for fans, and the new platform enables Arsenal to take full advantage of its rich media content. Since adding video to the homepage, Arsenal is seeing 15% more video views per user, with 20% longer dwell time on the homepage, and more than 33 years’ worth of content watched in May 2018 alone.

Arsenal now has the foundations to build upon its live content offering through real-time updates, such as match imagery within the live, minute-by-minute match-day coverage, and fan content from social channels. Having invested in customer relationship management (CRM) to improve fan relationships, Arsenal is now looking to focus on making fan experiences personalised, geo-targeted, and ever-more relevant.

We talk fan engagement with Arsenal's senior systems and operations manager, John Dollin.