How the Manchester Evening News went Sportloco

Scope
This case study describes how the Manchester Evening News (MEN) reaches out to a potential audience of 1.5 million amateur sports enthusiasts in the north west of England. It explains what is required to create an active and exciting Internet-based 'community' and shows how MEN was able to develop that community – Sportloco.com - without increasing technical management and support costs.

Background
In mid-2000 the Manchester Evening News (MEN), part of the Guardian Media Group, hit on the idea of an Internet-based amateur sporting 'community' to unite enthusiasts across the north-west of England. The site would provide free access to a single information resource for their favourite sports. A subsequent market research campaign across the region established that there were up to 750,000 people involved in all aspects of amateur sport – from actual players to parents and suppliers. Participants in amateur football number in excess of 150,000 alone. Tapping into such a large potential user base meant the site could potentially be funded through a mixture of sponsorship and conventional advertising. With its own established website and the information network of a major regional newspaper, the MEN already had access to many of the resources it needed for the new site. What was lacking, however, was the technical expertise needed to create the site and the means to get information to and from the user base. The solution arrived at with the help of e-business architects KMP Internet Solutions, was to design a site driven by email interaction with registered users – Sportloco.com.

Execution
Sportloco.com is an interactive community website catering for over 130 sports. The site offers amateur clubs and groups, from schools and youth clubs upwards, a platform for distributing news and information about their activities. Registered users of the site receive e-mail alerts and updates when new features appear on the subject of their favourite sport. This is made possible by GLCommunicator, powerful e-mail list creation and management software from UK messaging software specialist, Gordano Ltd.

KMP Internet Solutions has been building websites for five years. Technical Director, Nikk Smith, contrasts the traditional method of constructing an email database using the web or an application server and sending messages out one by one – "time-consuming, clunky and prone to failure" compared with the "streamlined and effective manner" in which Gordano's GLCommunicator operates. Leaving the Sportloco team the very manual task of managing the creation, storage, delivery and return of potentially millions of individual messages was never going to be an option. Smith explains that "Gordano's product allows you to move the processing to the mail server. So the application server decides who is going to get the mail and sends the appropriate commands to the mailserver, and the mailserver handles it from there."

When news or an article is due to be posted to members of a particular SportLoco.com sport group, it is contained in a single message sent to Gordano's GLCommunicator. The message has embedded Mail Meta Language (MML) instructions that define how GLCommunicator should generate and deliver the message. By using a single, direct link to SportLoco's SQL database, each message is delivered to just the right subscribers. It is the embedded MML and link to SQL tables that make GLCommunicator such an "extremely effective enterprise level solution" according to Smith. After all, SportLoco.com needs to be confident that every registered user will receive news on the chosen subject – say local Sunday league football – rather than the Ladies' Hockey Tournament dates instead!

In two years of working with Gordano's messaging software on a variety of Customer Relationship Management projects, KMP Internet Solutions are happy to report that the products perform exactly as promised. Smith and his colleagues have been particularly impressed by the ease with which a site's e-mail traffic, and the system's maintenance functions - which in practice require little human intervention - can be managed, using a simple web-based interface. Any bounced addresses are automatically suspended from the next mail out, so managing dead or faulty addresses is transparent. Such functionality is key to KMP, because the company aims to hand over fully-turnkey solutions whenever possible.

Perhaps surprisingly, given the broad reach of the project, the MEN has a team of just three managing and editing Sportloco.com. Most of the content is provided by the registered contributors who collect and collate the information from their own sports' leagues or clubs. Operations Director Mark Laverty recalled the choice of KMP Internet Solutions to build the site as prompted by, "not only their obvious technical expertise but also a feeling of maturity and stability about the company." When KMP proposed the use of Gordano's list server software, Laverty's team did some research of its own and "could find only positive comments on Gordano's products." The subsequent success of the MEN team with Gordano and KMP among its 'star players' has been confirmed by the number of Sportloco.com subscribers who are spending an average of twenty minutes on each visit to the site. "The integration of e-mail and web technology was definitely a contributory factor," said Laverty, "the e-mail alerts tell people that new information is available and this drives users back to our website time and time again."

To build on this impressive performance the MEN is moving up the league to tackle the possibility of giving clubs and members their own @Sportloco.com email addresses, powered by Gordano's GL WebMail browser-based e-mail client software. With a winning combination of messaging technology from Gordano and design expertise from KMP Internet Solutions , the MEN has created a community website in its truest sense.