Sponsor Roulette
We've attempted to bring some of the excitement of Las Vegas to the Majestri system. Your set of club sponsors can participate in a game of chance where the reward is their exposure to your member base.
Seriously, this functionality may change forever the way that you approach your local business community for ongoing commercial support.
Sponsor Roulette is the ultimate way to reward your valuable set of sponsors. Read on to find out how to set it up so you can start giving local businesses some huge rewards for the dollars they contribute.
Design Philosophies
We'd been wrestling with the problem for a long time:
What can we build into Majestri that will help local businesses extract the maximum value out of partnerships they have with our clubs?
We've always had the ability for you to model your sponsors in the system and expose them via the right-hand gutter on your Majestri site. Some of you have even gone to the effort of creating dedicated web pages to showcase your set of sponsors.
There are some benefits to your sponsors, mainly with building up SEO credibility by having natural content when the Googles comes a-crawlin', but our philosophy is that there are some problems with this approach:
- You've got all of your sponsors displayed in one place. They then start competing with each other for the attention of the visitor to the web page. It's a real "logo soup" and nobody really comes out a winner.
- It's hard to get people to visit your website. This is even more true in Majestri, where we've made our communication tools so good that it probably makes your members a little lazy - they come to expect that everything they need to know is going to appear in their email Inbox or on their phone. It's only going to be a small minority of people who proactively visit your web site to find out what's going on.
The first point is the big one in our opinion. The real value of sponsorship is exclusivity - the ability to be the lone brand being displayed in a certain context, not having to compete for attention.
The idea of Sponsor Roulette came when we were paying our monthly email bill. You may not know this, but all of the emails sent from Majestri use a serious transactional email provider called SendGrid. The Majestri system sends in excess of 250,000 emails per month. This means that any one club is probably sending thousands of emails via the system a year, and this figure is probably only going to rise as we round out the tools.
What we realised is that each of those emails is an opportunity to showcase a club sponsor. The most popular form of communication from club to member could also be harnessed to give local businesses exposure. It's also fair play for clubs to make it known that these businesses are valuable to the club, imploring members to always engage with them first when in need of a service that is handled by a sponsor.
So, we wanted a system that would pull out of your sponsors at random and build a sponsor card into the footer of each outbound email from the system. Because sponsors are tiered differently, we wanted to give you the ability to have some control over the "randomness" by assigning weightings per sponsor, enhancing or reducing the chances of their selection on a "per-email" basis.
Weightings
So how does the weighting system work, we hear you ask? You don't need to be an Applied Mathematics major to understand this - we've tried to keep it simple.
For each sponsor, we have a popup screen that lets you set different attributes about a sponsor. One of those settings is Roulette Weighting. You can set this to a non-zero number for any sponsor who is going to be
participating in your very own club roulette wheel.
Let's illustrate this with a scenario. You have 4 club sponsors - 2 Platinum and 2 Gold. The 2 Platinum sponsors may get a weighting of 2, and the 2 Gold sponsors may get a 1.
To figure out the "randomness", we sum up all of the weightings set for each sponsor, which for our example is a total of 6. When you look at a sponsor in isolation, their weighting divided by the total weighting, is their percentage chance of appearing in the footer of an email. Back to our example:
- Platinum sponsors have a "2/6" chance of appearing in an email footer = 33%.
- Gold sponsors have a "1/6" chance of appearing in an email footer = ~16.5%.
Testing Out The Weightings
We do like to build you some toys to play with, and so that you can understand the weightings and the "randomness" of the selection process, we've built you a model to test it out. It also gives you a glimpse of what the sponsor cards look like at the footer of the email.
From your main sponsors page, find the Roulette Wheel link that appears as a breadcrumb on the top right of screen.
In this model, all you need to do is enter how many emails you are hypothetically sending. When you click the button we simulate sending those emails and selecting a sponsor at random per email. The results show you how many times each sponsor got embedded in an email footer.
You need to be aware that the numbers are not going to exactly match the weightings - there is still an element of randomness to it all. The weightings are simply there to "affect" the randomness somewhat. You may still get outliers where a sponsor with a percentage chance of 10% may get 50% exposure. That's just the way randomness goes sometimes.
Coming Soon
The embedding of club sponsors into the footer of outbound emails is just solving one part of the problem. The other part is to complete that feedback loop so your sponsors then get visibility into just how much exposure they're getting. They really want to see how many emails they appeared on.
We are already tracking per sponsor each email they appear in. The second part of the solution is to produce a dashboard per sponsor that shows their "impressions" (how many times they featured) over a space of time, and allow you to then email that to your sponsor in a nice little visual package. That will close the loop nicely on your valuable sponsors, your local grassroot businesses, getting a great return on investment for the generosity they show to your club.
Questions?
If you're thinking of asking it, somebody has probably already beaten you to it, and we've documented it in our FAQ. To find out if we've already answered it, please visit: