Customer Stories

A-Leagues

A-League is the highest-level professional soccer league in Australia and New Zealand. At the top of the Australian league system, it is the country’s premier competition for the sport.

 Industries: Associations; sports

Headquarters: Sydney, Australia

Board Management Goals

  • Streamline coordination among clubs
  • Streamline documentation
  • Reduce volume of emails

Results

  • Streamlined communication
  • Documentation in one place
  • Better visibility and transparency

If you’re a football fan in Australia or New Zealand, chances are excellent you’re familiar with the A-Leagues. Celebrating its 20th season, the league features 14 clubs (12 in Australia and two in New Zealand). Most feature men’s and women’s teams. The clubs have passionate fan bases who care deeply about their clubs perform and represent their cities.

The league recognizes the value these fans bring. They value the fans’ input so much, they developed a Fan Representative Group (FRG) that meets once every two months to share feedback on how they believe the league is representing their clubs, and provide other feedback as well.

“Our passion is to bring the best of football locally and bring in international talent, but deliver the best football product we possibly can in conjunction with our clubs to football fans and deliver experiences,” says Maggie Isaac, the A-Leagues marketing manager. “It’s important we remember why we’re doing this. We’re offering fans and experience, memories, community. We refer to our fans as the 12th man on the pitch.”

Maggie plays an instrumental role in coordinating communication among the clubs, the A-League, and the FRG. Keeping 14 clubs, its fans, and the league — all groups with different priorities — on the same page can be challenging.

“My job was to collate each and every fan feedback line by line, topic by topic, to then send to 14 clubs,” Maggie says. “You can imagine the laborious task there.”

“There are currently reps of each of our clubs who are the voice of all our football fans across Australia and New Zealand,” Maggie adds. “These fans are elected or selected by their clubs and their fan groups to speak on behalf of and represent those fan bodies from a club perspective as well as a league level. My role in that is facilitating and engaging with these members. Some have more time than others. Some are more tech-savvy than others. It’s all volunteer work for them because they are so passionate about football and their clubs.”

An Unconventional Solution

The A-Leagues don’t use OnBoard in the traditional sense, where an organisation’s board of directors utilises the solution as a single source of truth for all board materials. Instead, the A-Leagues use OnBoard to streamline communication amongst the league, the clubs, and their fans.

“OnBoard has provided a solution to streamlining fan feedback to go directly to the fan representative group,” Maggie says. “The FRG would send me their meeting minutes after they’ve had their club and fan meetings, and then I would go through each of the meeting minutes per club, pull out key topics and key themes to then produce an agenda, and that was done per club. The rest of the FRG members wouldn’t see each other’s submissions, and so they wanted to trust that the A-leagues was actually reading all their topics that they were submitting for discussion and consideration.

“A lot of times in previous meetings, some members would say, ‘How come my topic hasn’t been addressed today?’ Maggie continued. “So, there was a lot of frustration and lack of understanding. Transparency and visibility were so important, and that’s something that has benefitted us greatly on the OnBoard platform, and it’s been welcomed by the FRG as well.”

“One of the reasons we went with [OnBoard] is because the customer service was so quick to respond, [They responded] within an hour or so, upon submitting a request. That was important to us. It shouted out loud, ‘We’ve got a great customer service support team here for you when you need it.’ I got that vibe straight away, and that was important for us.”

— Maggie Isaac, Marketing Manager A-Leagues

Why OnBoard Was the Choice

The A-Leagues explored several different solutions — some conventional board management portals like OnBoard — and others that weren’t. Maggie says OnBoard won out with its prompt customer service and support.

“One of the reasons we went with [OnBoard] is because the customer service was so quick to respond,” Maggie says. “[They responded] within an hour or so, upon submitting a request. That was important to us. It shouted out loud, ‘We’ve got a great customer service support team here for you when you need it.’ I got that vibe straight away, and that was important for us.”

Maggie and the FRG members also appreciated OnBoard’s streamlined communication, and the documentation living in one place, which in turn provided the transparency and visibility that everyone invloved craved.

“That’s something that has benefitted us greatly on the OnBoard platform, and it’s been welcomed by the FRG as well,” Maggie says. “The meetings functionality is great. When they learn to annotate documents in real time, that’s going to save us a lot of time and effort.”

The implementation process was quick and easy, and the variety of features the OnBoard platform offered also impressed Maggie and other FRG members.

“OnBoard moved swiftly and was flexible in terms of supporting us and getting us up and running quickly,” she says. “It’s helped change the FRG’s perspective of the A-leagues and how we take them seriously.

“It came down to the capabilities. OnBoard had that little bit of extra capability that solved our problem, and having customer support local was important for us,” Maggie adds. “The customer service pace was huge for me, and the solutions it provides checked the boxes.”

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