Chattanooga Football Club’s purpose is to build community through the world’s game. Soccer shapes culture, develops talent, and unites diverse peoples—which is everything we want to bring to Chattanooga.
When you’re a non-profit working with limited resources, you have to be creative in how you stay connected with your community. Especially when a worldwide pandemic hits, and you’re trying to keep people engaged. We were looking for some more opportunities to connect with our fans, because email wasn’t cutting it. So we decided to look into texting, since we knew it was the way our fans wanted to communicate with us.
We chose Text Request to manage our messages, because their support team always gets back to us immediately whenever we have a question or need. They’ll regularly hold Zoom meetings with us to help generate ideas for increasing customer engagement, and I feel like they’re always in our corner working through things with us.
We regularly use Text Request to message fans for feedback after attending their first game, as well as during the game for SMS promotions. For example, we had a giveaway contest for moms during a game on Mother’s Day weekend, and we got great engagement from people in the stadium using Text Request as a way to invite them to enter. We were able to get their entries, plus save their contact info for follow-ups and feedback, by using the keyword feature.
Text Request is also useful during our youth summer programs, when we need to reach parents if there’s a change in the drop-off location or a cancellation because of weather. It’s also a great way for our operations manager to instantly reach people during game days for last minute staff openings.
Our ticketing team saw engagement immediately increase when they started using Text Request. It transformed our communication strategy coming out of the pandemic, and we’re thrilled to be getting all these new interactions with fans, in addition to being able to respond to them quicker.
Our fans are always surprised to learn that we have a small staff, because our messaging is so quick and professional. Text Request helps our communication stay personal, but at the scale and speed of a large business. It’s opened the doors to how we reach our city.
