Hawthorn Football Club

Kicking goals with Salesforce

The Hawthorn Football Club is a storied institution of football. The Club boasts an enviable membership base and 13 championship trophies on display in the clubhouse. Engaging with its fans and stakeholders is an important part of the Hawks success and something the organisation wanted to improve on through innovative technology.

Hawthorn came to Skie needing to replace an aging solution that was cumbersome to manage and had limited support. It was apparent that user experience was poor and the system in general was not connected to the rest of the business’ processes or technology. The brief was to add value to the overall fan experience from a marketing perspective and reimagine the corporate hospitality technology stack. The business needed to better manage its events and corporate sales processes in order to drive the commercial operations of the Club.

Placing the customer in the center, full forward and midfield.

Getting a 360 degree view of the customer was critical to the Hawthorn solution. Salesforce’s open API and endless extensibility allowed us to aggregate ticket and membership data with native CRM data to accurately build a complete contact profile. From here, we could tackle each line of business’ unique requirements.

For the corporate hospitality use case, we needed a way to manage complex events, ticketing and branding all while have a deep connection to the sales and sponsorship teams. Our solution turned to the Salesforce ecosystem and the Blackthorn suite of products. Here we had a Salesforce native solution with powerful event management functionality that was perfect for the task at hand. Augmented with process automation, Formstack and a lot of collaboration with the Hawks amazing team, we had a winning combination.

On the marketing automation side, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the crown jewel driving deeper fan engagement through intelligent journeys driven by integrated data.