2021 SHORTLIST

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LA DODGERS CO-CREATE WITH FANS TO CELEBRATE CHAMPIONSHIP

Entrant Company: Greenfly

FINALIST

Best Use of Technology

LA Dodgers Co-Create With Fans to Celebrate Championship

ABOUT THIS ENTRY

When the Dodgers clinched the 2020 World Series championship with only a handful of fans in the stands, the club’s digital team sought a way to capture and recreate the magic and energy of that moment with their global community of loyal followers.

How does this represent “Excellence in Engagement”?

By using Greenfly, “Excellence in Engagement” has come to life for the Los Angeles Dodgers — and promises to move the sports industry forward — in three key ways:

  • An easy solution that enables fans to participate in daily and unforgettable sports moments — from wherever they are
  • A mobile technology that boosts deeper sports team, league and athlete connections to fans where they are gathering and consuming sports the most today: social media
  • A turn-key method for sports digital teams to access and amplify original fan-generated content and build year-round fan engagement

As Caroline Morgan, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Vice President of Digital Strategy, put it best:

"Greenfly has been an incredible asset for the Dodgers social team over the past few years and is now helping us facilitate deeper connections with fans. ... By using +Engage, we’ve already collected thousands of photos and videos with just a single Twitter post. We’re thrilled to share those incredible reactions and celebrations with our fans!”

“It gave us an opportunity to celebrate and thank our fans for their support during a trying year, and also let the Dodger fanbase relive that amazing moment when the team won it all.”

 

Objective: With fans unable to attend baseball games for most of the 2020 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers knew that engaging fans on social media has become mission-critical. These platforms became the virtual stadiums where fans gathered to experience and share daily and unforgettable sports moments. The pandemic has permanently altered the way audiences consume and share their passion for sports.

After winning the World Series, the Dodgers wanted to bring fans together and immerse them in that sublime experience since they couldn’t be together en masse in the stadium or elsewhere to revel in the team’s first title since 1988.

With no victory parade in sight, the Dodgers’ objective was to boost fan engagement and provide their supporters with an easy way to share in this special championship. They decided to ask fans for home videos highlighting their spontaneous reactions to the final Series out. They planned to share those stories on the club’s social channels for followers everywhere to enjoy.

 

Strategy & Execution: Greenfly Co-Founder Shawn Green played five seasons for the Dodgers, who use Greenfly to collect media for digital promotions. The club’s digital team leveraged this technology to co-create media around the World Series win with their modern sports fans in mind — engaging both their devout and casual supporters.

Within days of the October championship, the Dodgers ran a digital fan engagement campaign with Greenfly +Engage, a new product created specifically for crowdsourcing original fan media. The team collected Dodger fans’ authentic video reactions to the victory for a spotlight promotional video.

+Engage’s automated, one-click technology allowed fans to submit their authentic, emotional reaction videos from their mobile device or computer.

They clicked the team’s campaign link and uploaded their recorded video content on a Dodgers-branded page. The team promoted the campaign through fan database emails and social channel posts. They collected and organized the fan video submissions faster and more efficiently than possible through email or custom web applications. The 100% rights-cleared content was automatically routed into an organized media library, tagged and sorted – all within Greenfly.

The team edited select clips into a heart-warming 90-second compilation video launched across the Dodgers’ social channels — for followers to enjoy immediately.

 

Results:

Greenfly simplified the Dodgers’ content workflows, enabling a small but mighty social team to execute a wildly successful digital fan engagement campaign in such a short window.

The team received over 4,000 reaction videos through Greenfly +Engage from fans and families celebrating the club's title at home. Most of these clips came within the first 24 hours of their initial outreach. The final compilation video garnered over 1.5 million views and nearly 100,000 engagements across the Dodgers’ social channels. They expanded their fan database in the process by collecting basic contact information with each submission and were happy to have so much amazing fan reaction content. The Los Angeles Times and Sports Business Journal were among the top publications that highlighted this fan engagement success story.

The team plans to build upon this success and drive ongoing engagement with their robust fan community. They intend to involve their diehard supporters more in media co-creation and create opportunities for them to access exclusive club content.

Although Dodger loyalists were separated physically at such a glorious moment in the franchise’s history, generations of fans were still able to come together through the connecting power of Greenfly and digital media.

PRODUCTION

Greenfly, Los Angeles Dodgers
 

CREDITS

President & CEO
Greenfly
 
VP, Digital Strategy
Los Angeles Dodgers

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