Digital and IT Update – Tickets, Shop and Website

Since taking up post I’ve been looking at how the Club can make better use of information technology.  There’s a lot of good stuff in place but plenty of room for improvement. The primary thing I’m looking to do is make sure that, as a Club, we are easy to do business with. That covers everything from selling season tickets and merchandise, to helping our sponsors, paying our bills and improving our communications.

It’s a bit of a long-term project with the main aim being to make sure we have an infrastructure fit for a modern, progressive football club. If we can be as professional off the pitch as Darren and the team are on the pitch we can work together and hopefully enjoy success.

I’ve split the work into two main streams:

• external systems (how we do business with customers, fans and sponsors)
• internal systems (how club staff and volunteers can use IT to help them do their job more efficiently)

At the moment, I’m concentrating on our external systems.  We’ve agreed a priority for refresh and development along the following lines:

• Ticketing – we’re looking at all aspects of ticketing including season tickets, matchday tickets and hospitality tickets as well as giving people as much choice as possible when paying at the gate
• Online Shop – our online shop is difficult to administer and needs better integration with the Club Shop at the stadium
• Website – our current website is not really fit for purpose so will be redesigned and relaunched

I’ll issue more information about these individual projects and how we’re progressing as we move through the summer but I can tell you that we’re going to introduce e-ticketing this season. It will be limited to start with, as this is a complex area and we want to make sure everyone is happy as we proceed through the project.

The plan is to start with season tickets. Fans will be able to buy online through our new ticketing partner. Season tickets can be downloaded and kept on your phone and you will need to scan them in as you enter Forthbank next season. We know some people might want an actual physical ticket so you will be able to order one up when you buy. We may need to charge a small cost for this to cover our printing costs. Both the physical season ticket and the electronic one will contain a code – called a QR code – which season ticket holders will need to scan to gain entry into the ground.

We’re also considering trying out matchday tickets for the pre-season friendlies and possibly the Viaplay Cup matches in July. This approach lets us identify any issues and only move forward when we’re comfortable doing so. There’s a lot of planning involved. We need to test the system, make sure everyone is trained, plan for things going wrong (which they do sometimes) and assess the impact on introducing the service – both for the multitude of people who work hard behind the scenes on matchdays and for you – the fans. We also need to make sure the system is delivering some benefit to us as a business.

So we’ll run matchday ticketing as a trial and at the end we’ll send out a survey and use the results to determine the next stage.

So keep watching our social channels for news of season and matchday tickets. I’m hoping to have news of that early next week. And I’ll publish another update towards the end of the month to let everyone know how we’re progressing.

Robert Clubb

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