So, no complaints about the team on the field the last couple of years. In years past, the FO used to read Bigsoccer, I doubt there's anyone left with the time, or knowledge of the fan base to do that, but where else can we vent? Something has become very evident since the new ownership group took over and pushed for Buzzard Point - they are not going to spend a dime on advertising the team, selling tickets, having a social media presence, making inroads into the community other than it's one charitable arm, or even improving the game day experience back to what it used to be for fans at RFK. I will give several examples to help flesh out the discussion. Let's start with attendance, which I believe has dropped precipitously due to a lack of advertising and a competent, steady, ticket sales department. I will acknowledge 2 mitigating attendance factors before presenting my evidence, though: lack of access to Lot 8 for Virginia drivers and the general state of decay of RFK, which I literally took home a chunk of last game. Those factors being acknowledged, it's clear that the FO ticketing operation is on a shoestring budget. There's literally no sales staff that stays year to year anymore. A good example is our friend @Atouk, who has had a rep change the last 2 years. Oh, and before the RBNJ game, no one contacted his family to tell them they would need to be relocated because there were away fans being seated in/adjacent to their section. They were left to ask game day staff. Any local fan could tell you there's been 0 advertising for the team. 0. Unless you count giving local radio station some tickets to give away for a free mention. No buzz whatsoever, which leads us to the team's AWFUL social media presence. There's clearly no strategy, for anyone who knows anything about actually using social media for business. I can't even remember the last time I got a ticketing email - I think I got one mass email before the season, that's it. For example, the times of day in which they post, and the types of tweets that they use, are very ineffective. They also provide very little side information in terms of actual journalism about the team, simply collecting a few links each morning (on an infrequent basis, might I add - good luck guessing when they'll tweet the "newstand".) Another example - the team was given a shout out on Sportscenter after all 3 DC teams won on Tuesday night. DCU social media never RT'd a tweet about it, never congratulated the other teams in town, etc. Just very poor social media presence which screams they gave the account to a 20 something intern because "nobody else gets this twitter and facebook thing." How about the game day experience? I'll give 2 quick examples. MPD has been very aggressive in clearing fans out after the game which has never been the case until this year. Team has been made aware, no response, no change in MPD behavior. Better example, because we all care about beer. Remember when we all thought The Tradition partnership with DC Brau wasn't renewed because of the league-wide Heineken deal? Turns out we were wrong, teams are very much still allowed to have local beer partners. How much you wanna bet some intern never got the email to contact DC Brau to get this rolling again? It wasn't the best beer, but it was nice enough, and lord knows we need better beer at RFK. I know this has come off as a list of gripes, which is exactly what it is, but I implore you to look beyond the whiny tone and see the ways in which our FO is selling the team far, far short. I know they're in saving money mode until the new stadium opens, but this is no way to treat our fans, nor really, the team itself. It's so bush league, when you add it all together.
I never post on this forum anymore but the link Natty posted to this led me here and I'm glad it did. Couldn't agree more with the overwhelming majority of it. The Twitter thing in particular drives me nuts. It's free marketing. Free! Everybody loves them some free, right? Yet, United, and even the Caps to some extent (but that's a discussion for BigHockey), don't come close to maximizing what social media can do for them. And worse, when it's suggested to them that they can improve, the response is usually silence and no improvements are seen. I literally volunteered (for free!) to operate it for them at one point and got no response. The team invites a lot of don't-give-a-damn upon itself, which is a shame. I think someone somewhere believes that because the stadium was approved (with not a shovel in the ground yet, mind you), that makes everything else OK and everyone is just supposed to sit down and shut up and watch the game. I can add from my perspective that what used to be weekly contacts from ticket folks last season (which worked, they got me to buy tickets to games), have gone completely silent this year. I haven't heard from a rep since January 22, and only received 2 mass-emails since then, as well.
None? I mean, we haven't beaten New Jersey a lot recently. . . But anyway, I tend to agree. I've been waiting for them to sort of start to gear up. I understood backing off while the stadium was more of a question and I can understand that they might not want to go full-tilt until there are spades in dirt, but if there really is going to be an "extravaganza" around the stadium opening, I don't think they can start in the off-season before the stadium opens. When they took over, there wasn't a lot to sell about the team, but the team is doing better now on the field and the end of RFK is in sight. Maybe it's too early to start a send-off campaign for RFK, but even for someone who never knew the stadium in its prime, there is a lot of DCU and soccer history in that stadium that seems easily marketable to me. There are LivingSocial deals and occasionally I hear radio ads, but the Kennedy Center reps call me three times a year and I almost never go there - I haven't heard from DC United in years. Granted, I don't get my tickets from a rep, but I feel like if you're trying to rebuild a fanbase, you contact everyone for whom you have information. The police thing is weird to me. It was happening at the end of last year, too. I hadn't even made it to my car after the last playoff game when an officer told us to hurry it up. We saw other groups of post-match tailgaters being broken up, so we didn't even try. I'm not sure we can pin that on the FO though - I don't know how getting police help for these events works, it could be that the FO is unwilling to pay for the additional hour(s) of police presence or that the police are instructed to get everyone out so they can turn out the lights. Either way, I found it quite toxic. I want to say that maybe since it is unlikely that tailgating will be part of supporters' culture at the new stadium that the FO is indifferent to promoting or defending it, but that seems like it would require more forethought than the FO is giving things right now.
I agree with almost everything you've written; but before adding my own comments, I wanted to single out one thing I don't agree with: I'm presuming that by clearing out, you mean clearing out Lot 8? It's not normally MPD that clears people out of the stadium itself -- that's CSC. Anyway, assuming you mean Lot 8, I seriously doubt that this is something DCU has even the tiniest, tiniest bit of control over. It's not their stadium, it's not on their land, and MPD doesn't answer to them. That doesn't excuse a lack of response from the team, mind: even if they can't do anything about it, they should say "sorry, can't do anything about it." There should never be a complete lack of response. But I can't blame the team for MPD being more aggressive in the parking lot. With that said . . .in all other respects I agree with you, Natty. You could have said a lot more, too. The management of the website's content is shockingly bad, with horrendous editing, frequent misspelling of team or player names (including our own players from time to time), and content that strongly suggests that the writer just learned how to spell the word "soccer" this past week. It feels very, very minor league. Hell, I'm not sure it measures up to a high-school level of preparation and presentation. This is the first year I've had season tix since 2009 (in the intervening five years, I had a credential, so didn't need tickets); so I've been able to experience what things are like for season ticketholders. There are lots of little things I could say; but the strongest impression I've taken away so far (which summarizes all those little things) is of tremendous disorganization, like people don't really know what they're doing. The part of this that breaks my heart is that I think that this lackadaisical attitude will have a significant result going forward: they're setting themselves up for, if not failure, then a muted limp success with the new stadium. "New stadium smell" has consistently not worked in this league: simply building a new stadium has not caused a significant rise in the level of interest that's lasted beyond the first month or so. Some people like to suggest KC as an exception; but actually KC makes my point for me, because they're not an exception at all. KC didn't simply build a new stadium. They also developed, and then executed over the years leading up to the stadium's opening, an aggressive plan to both improve the quality of their team and attractiveness of its style of play, combined with a massive commitment to marketing and to the fan experience. The New York Times wrote a very edifying article about everything that KC did to make sure that interest was off the hook by the time that the stadium opened (and the huge role that social media played for them). When I had lunch with Jason Levien before the beginning of last season, I talked about exactly this with him, and he seemed interested and contacted me later for a reference/link to the NYTimes article. But if I've seen any change at all to how DCU handles its operations since then, it's been for the worse, not better.
It's gotten to the point where being a D.C. United fan is like being a member of a secret club. You know when and where to show up, but the average person has no clue about the team. There are many things that have frustrated me about the FO over the last few years. They've mismanaged just about every aspect of the team, from their sour relationship with the supporter groups to the failure to maintain the partnership with D.C. Brau. There's no attempt to generate any kind of buzz. Casual fans are never going to show up when they can go to a Nats or Caps game for an all around better game day experience. When the team does have a "promotion", it essentially spits on the season ticket holders by providing a perk to a casual fan and not giving anything in return to the die-hards (for example, $20 ticket + a free beer). When they have giveaways, the game day staff never have any clue about them. I've had to go on journeys around the entire stadium just for a free hat because nobody is aware of the promotion. As you mentioned, the social media presence is atrocious. The content on the website sucks ("You'll NEVER guess what kind of ice cream Sean Franklin prefers", etc.). I love this team and will continue going to games, but it's hard to ignore some of these major flaws. The only reason I can get family and friends to come to games with me is because they have fun with the awesome fans and like supporting the team.
Right. At this point, what draws friends of ours who aren't already DCU fans is mostly the tailgating before the match, and a little bit of the supporters group experience if we take them into the supporters' sections. Nothing DCU themselves are doing is drawing anyone I know, except folks like us that are always there anyway.
I know Kevin Payne was a polarizing figure, but at least when he was President of DC United there was the appearance of someone who cared about the soccer and the fans. This FO has no visible face other than Jason Levien who seems like a part-time executive that only cares about the stadium. There just doesn't seem to be anyone at all in a day-to-day position of authority with the club who has a public face. Payne? gone Doug Hicks? gone Not to mention the myriad of other customer facing people who have left over the years. DC United used to be about relationships with the fans and the community. Maybe that had to change to change at some point, but it is kind of sad to realize this is really just a business, they don't really care about us as fans, just the dollar we pump into the team.
Who took over for Kyle Sheldon? He was very active on social media and did a good job. I don't see anyone with that role on the listing of DCU FO employees.
No kidding. Last Saturday, after refereeing a couple matches with an old friend, we were talking and I mentioned I was headed to RFK. This is a hard core soccer guy - player, coach, ref - and as we spoke it was pretty clear that he knew almost nothing about what was going on with DCU.
Last fall I had a ~90 minute meeting with Tom Hunt (COO) and Mike Schoenbrun (Chief Revenue Officer) and Jason Levein made about a 10-20 minute appearance. They talked to me about about everything I wanted to talk about. We talked about marketing, ticket sales, sales, the stadium, their relationship with the Supporter's Groups. I learned a lot from this meeting and how they view things. My perspective is that they treat this very much as a straight by the books (i.e. budget) business. Which it is. And from their perspective they've stepped into something that caters to a small subset of people that do not financially merit the benefits they receive while the club ignored more traditional and more substantial revenue sources (my words). They now run a business that has a small share of the sports business market and does things that alienates potential sales growth (as per example - marketing research which showed the badge inhibited sales or DC United merchandise and why it will be re-designed). In response to this meeting my attitudes and feelings towards the club have changed. I only care about viewing an entertaining product. Not unlike how I care about drinking coca-cola. If I like it I will buy it. I don't worry about how many people buy coke, or its advertising, or its associated merchandise for sale. While before, I worried about those things because I treated the club as something more than a business. No more. The perspective that DC United is more than a business and it is part of the community/family thing that Payne heavily used is gone. The Ownership and Front Office has changed and I have changed in response to the club. Now, I do feel they care about selling their product. And they are responsive to STH's. So - if you want a meeting with Hunt or Schoenbrun I would suggest contacting your ticket rep and have them set it up (mine came about because I said I wasn't going to renew and the ticket rep offered the meeting). If you think they're failing you as a consumer, complaining about it here won't change anything. It requires direct contact and the willingness to stop buying their product.
Except it didn't, and doesn't, have to change. The proof is in the (apparently) financially successful teams in the league, like KC, Portland, and Seattle, that do not come across that way.
I agree with everything said above, except missing Kevin Payne. Actually my gripes with him came from him messing up the soccer side of the club. The team under that leadership did maintain good relations with the soccer community, supporters groups and local media. Have you noticed that there are one or two kid soccer teams walking in before the team? Used to be about twenty every game. This requires working with youth clubs but it fills seats now and builds memories with kids who will fill the supporters groups in 15 years or so. Twitter? Totally non-existent. Facebook? Nothing really. Hell, the Barra and SE do a much better job with volunteers. And I agree with Freekickwiz that it seems like the whole thing is like some secret DC soccer club that only we members can talk about! So if they view this as a business and that we SGs (who are the only ones buying their product) are a pain in the bottom line as was stated above, why not use social media better? Why not build relationships with the youth soccer community? It would seem they are failing on their own plans.
The thing is, though, that this is a false dichotomy. It is possible for them to be primarily sensitive to the bottom line and still demonstrate that they care about their fans. We know this is possible because other teams that are far more successful financially than DC United are doing it, and have been. Personally, whatever Hunt and Schoenbrun may have said, I don't get the impression that they're primarily motivated by the bottom line. If they were, then they'd understand that you have to spend some money to make money. They indicated to you that they think the badge limits potential revenues? Sorry, as just one example, I think the complete and utter lack of a viable social media presence limits potential revenues far, far more.
It may not have to change but it did. They would very much like to have the sales of Seattle. A big part of that is not allowing the Supporters Groups be quite so independent. Are you sure you want that? I don't mean to present it as a dichotomous option, just they path they've chosen. They may not be very good at doing what they want but this is the path they're going down. Yes they told me about a results from a marketing firm that tested badges appeal and several groups of people disliked it. You may be correct that lack of advertising limits potential revenue far more, but that is just a supposition (or lacks specific evidence) and by someone that is not responsible for running the franchise.
Actually, I disagree with your statement that that's "a big part of that". The vast majority of Seattle's sales are not to supporters group members.
If they want to have the sales of Seattle, it would help a lot if they marketed like Seattle does, got their presence out there like Seattle does, stayed connected to their fans like Seattle does, etc. They've chosen not to do these things; so unsurprisingly not many people show up to the matches.
I specifically stayed away from mentioning the relationship with the supporters groups because I didn't want it to devolve into another discussion of that. I don't really think any of the things I've pointed out have anything to do with that...just another symptom of not having anyone really accountable.
Look not letting SGs sell tickets on their own terms is a thing that is over. The SGs are still coming to the games. No one else is! If they want to fill seats -- spend a bit on social media. Build community relations with the soccer community. Have meaningful outreach to local ethnic communities that go beyond a sometimes papusa vendor. This isn't rocket science
A much bigger part is having a good gameday experience, a huge online presence including great content on their own website, marketing, etc. DCU's strategy for everything right now seems to be "Hey, see you at the new stadium!" As others have pointed out, the successful stadium launches in MLS (KC comes to mind particularly, but there are others) had the foundations laid in the seasons before the team moved.
Fair enough but people are accountable. And from everything I can tell are quite responsive (at least if you're a STH). I'm not saying I like the things they're doing (although the Pinstripes event is better than any event the club did previously).
As nice as the Pinstripes party is, it kinda pisses me off. Maybe its just me, but I would much rather they spend the money they drop on that party (and I'm sure it is a lot, I wouldn't be surprised if it is $100k+) on a down payment for an attacking midfielder or a true winger. Or even invest in a scout other then Kurt Morsink.
I have no idea what the Pinstripes party is. I'm not a STH holder, just a schlub who spends his $ at RFK more or less every home game. I hate seeing the huge swaths of empty orange seats because no one at the FO has a clue about how to have an online presence and the owners won't spend a time on marketing, etc., in an era where MLS stadiums are fuller than ever. I hate that Philly has a Dogfishhead Beer Garden and no one at our FO could be bothered to do whatever it was to keep the relationship going with DC Brau. I hate that no one can be bothered to tell people WITH SEASON TICKETS their seats are being moved to accommodate away fans. I hate 90% of the joke content on our website. As someone in that very FO once said (a long time ago in a Galaxy far far away...) - It Takes More.