AFL Best Practices: Collingwood Pies Incentivize Fans to Grow Their Fan Base

How proud are you of your fan base? Enough to broadcast it as the first thing one sees upon hitting your website? Enough to encourage others to recruit to grow this base?

The Collingwood Magpies offer us a clinic on how to elevate and grow their fan base.

We'll start our journey by visiting the Collingwood Magpies home page, shown below. As you can clearly tell, they are hyping the size of the fan base immediately. I quickly checked out their Facebook page (here) and found roughly 130,000 fans -- meaning this was something totally different. But what?

Scrolling down the page you'll find this image -- a call to push the Pies past the 70,000 fan threshold. (Which they have) I clicked in...

Clicking in takes you here, to the Membership home of the Collingwood Magpies. Love this idea: Become a member and get some product (lanyard, magnet, ticket wallet, bumper sticker) and some access (priority ability to purchase tickets)... plus discounts on more gear.

But it was the next level that has me buzzing: They want not just members but recruiters. "The more you recruit, the more stars and stripes you earn. The major prize winning recruiter will win a return trip for two to Europe flying with Emirates..." So, the person who brings the most new fans into the fold gets rewarded, big time.

Love this idea -- find your biggest fans and reward them.

How could this be better? This is a great start. But I'd love to add two dimensions to it. First, how can we reward the best fans not with travel, but with access to the team? Don't just let them fly somewhere. Let them fly with the team and/or sit on the sidelines during a game. Give them what they are most after -- access to their favorite team. It'll cost less, and it will return more! Secondly, I'd love to see this idea introduced into the Facebook world. They have nearly double the fan base on Facebook, and I'd love to see them ask their members to recruit new fans on Facebook, on top of new Pie Army members! If you're a fan, you'll be down with multiple ways to follow the club and this is another way of bringing your biggest fans closer to you.

That's a wrap. Come back tomorrow for more AFL Best Practices! As always, you can follow me on Twitter (I'm @pawlow34) or on Facebook (Digital Hoops Blast).

Thanks!

Andy