Every decision we make inside the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), no matter the department or personnel, is made with our members in mind. Whether they are among the nearly 5,000 current players in our membership, or one of the 50,000-plus retired professionals we continue to serve, our success as an organization is measured, not only by the number of members we support, but also how the way we operate benefits the people we represent.
Above all else, the PFA belongs to the players, so it is vital that they have a say in what our priorities, as a union, should be. To achieve this objective, it’s important that we continue to adapt to reflect the needs of members and, for the past two years, this has involved making upgrades to the PFA’s digital infrastructure, including the implementation of the PFA’s first-ever member and employee portals.
We’re entering the third year of the PFA’s digital roadmap, delivered in partnership with N3XT Sports. Whereas, historically, the union has been heavily reliant on ‘old fashioned’ paper communications, with the limitations that involves, our collaboration has transformed the way in which our organization collects, shares, and analyzes membership data – granting our members a better user experience (UX) through the member portal, and more resources for our executives to best meet their needs.
Therefore, in order to effectively serve existing members, we have adopted our first fully integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform to manage our membership data and communications, tailoring our solutions to their needs on a more personal level. This also helps scale the union’s first paperless operation and allows our members to navigate our system more easily, including how they retrieve information they are looking for online and to get more out of their membership.
DATA MANAGEMENT KEY TO EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY & CLIENT INITIATIVES
The new employee portal has not only enhanced the way that the PFA operates internally, but also provides our staff with direct access to the PFA’s first-ever fully integrated member portal, which acts as a direct line of communication between the union and our members. By gaining a unique understanding of the PFA’s members who play for professional clubs in England and Wales, as well as former professional players, our team is better equipped than ever to meet their needs and enhance the members’ experience on and off the football pitch.
We engage every club up and down the country, including the men’s Premier League, the Women’s Super League (WSL), and the 72 teams that play in the English Football League (EFL). By understanding the wants and needs of the football community, we are able to build a culture inside the PFA organization that best represents our members. Providing the resources that enable our workforce to meet our members’ common, collective challenges directly, we recognize the importance for enhancing the employee experience (EX), too – in order to drive membership satisfaction.
For example, since adopting our employee portal last year, the PFA’s Education Department is processing member applications at least 50 percent faster than it used to. Whereas the member portal enables our membership base to manage and customize their own data via a centralized system, the employee portal has consolidated the PFA’s existing resources into one easy-to-use interface. Operating alongside the member portal, this acts as a universal hub for our entire workforce and is implemented in a way that allows our operations to be adapted to the employee’s preferred workflows.
THE PFA IS A BENCHMARK FOR DIGITALIZING PLAYERS UNIONS
In order to understand the technology solutions we need to adopt, from day one, N3XT Sports helped our team to: (1) understand how data is used throughout the organization; (2) where we could eventually make viable changes to our ecosystem, so to improve the flow of data via our digital touchpoints; and (3) how to optimize the role of our newly rolled out member portal to improve our service.
We truly want PFA members to see what the union is doing and how it can help them throughout their careers on and off the pitch. Furthermore, this also includes the digital literacy of our workforce, so as to help our personnel understand the reasons for change inside the union and how to utilize our new CRM capabilities and leverage our members’ data for the player’s own benefit.
This means making efforts to better understand the member’s individual needs and to ensure that they receive a more personalized experience every time that they interact with the PFA. To help us do this, our work with N3XT Sports will continue to play an important role in our evolution as a digital-first, data-driven organization. Through the digital transformation of the PFA, our commitment to our members will set a benchmark for the rest of the industry to measure their own digital capabilities going forward.
In summary, by putting the players at the heart of our decision-making processes, the technologies we choose to implement will have an unmistakable impact on their success and the success of our sport in the years to come.
That vision must start today; and I welcome the PFA, its members and stakeholders to keep an open dialogue on the ways we can make the game more exciting, more inclusive, and more innovative for the years to come. By digitizing the PFA’s member relationships, we aim to ensure that every voice is heard and is given the due diligence it deserves.