Heightening Fan Engagement at 2024 PGA Championships

In the 2024 PGA Championship season, the PGA of America aimed to elevate the attending fan experience with the launch of the new PGA Championships mobile app, combining all three PGA championships into one platform. As their Official Technology Partner, CapTech supported the PGA by enhancing the data-driven fan journey and creating a seamless fan experience that enabled fans to enjoy their day, their way.

CapTech began with a deep dive into understanding the attending fan experience. Drawing on its expertise in professional golf and customer experience, CapTech crafted seven detailed proto personas that captured the goals, pain points, and desires of the attending fan. This approach facilitated the creation of a comprehensive Championship Golf attending fan journey, spanning from pre-event to arriving on course. The journey identified over 50 touchpoints to proactively send important spectator information and personalized offers for the attending fan segments.

Powered by the fan journey, CapTech created a data strategy for the PGA that utilized the new attending fan features within the PGA Championships mobile app to monitor, measure, and visualize fan movements around the golf course, engagement with the AI-powered spectator guide, and interactions with event-related push notifications throughout their day.

The captured fan data allowed the PGA to evaluate the effectiveness of personalized content for attending fans and, where necessary, minimize friction to provide an optimal experience attending the PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club throughout the week as fan movement, engagement, and event questions in the AI spectator guide were received.

In addition to understanding where to engage the fan during their Championship journey, creating an easy-to-use experience with the new, onsite interactive map was critical. An interactive map zoom strategy was created to make sure the relevant points of interest were filtered when the map was accessed by fans, providing the necessary recommendations for the most used attractions at a major Golf Championship, and providing an easy way to explore other areas of interest within the map efficiently.

Creating a more personalized fan experience across the attending fan journey started with targeted mobile app push notifications for the on-site attending fan throughout their day. More than 134,000 geo-triggered notifications were proactively sent to the attending fan segment during the Championships, while over 996,000 push notifications were delivered through scheduled alerts to fans who indicated within the app that they were attending the championship. The personalized geo-triggered push notifications resulted in a remarkable 4x increase compared to engagement benchmarks, and a 2x higher engagement rate than regular attending fan scheduled notifications, demonstrating the power of personalization has on fans.

CapTech's strategic implementation of geo-fences enabled the monitoring of fan movement across the golf course. Of the 60% of Championship attending fans sharing their location, 4.7mm location pings were collected, showing that fans spent an average of 4.25 hours on course during the Championship and highlighting valuable fan movement trends to improve event operations in the future, while creating a better experience for fans.

The AI-powered spectator guide was a new feature in 2024 for the PGA Championships app, providing automated assistance for fans to ask questions and get help as they experienced the PGA Championship. CapTech’s active monitoring of the tool, combined with ongoing prompt and model tuning during Championship Week, drove down the number of questions per engagement by 33%, showing a marked improvement in efficiency for fans.

Capturing and leveraging data is pivotal in creating a superior fan experience, as demonstrated by the PGA of America's 2024 Championships data strategy. By informing strategies through comprehensive fan journeys, organizations can personalize interactions, minimize friction, and enhance fan engagement. CapTech utilized the fan journey to understand how to best capture and apply data for the different fan segments, improving our strategies for geo-triggered notifications, location tracking, AI guide, and the interactive map. This data-centric approach not only boosts immediate fan satisfaction but also provides valuable insights for continuous improvement, ultimately fostering a deeper connection between the Championship and its attendees.