Challenge: In 2002, entering its second season, the Women’s United Soccer Association, a new professional women’s soccer league, needed a professional internet solution for the league and its member teams. The league needed a backend infrastructure that would allow it to share content with its teams, while handling live scoring and frequent updating of content. The league was looking for a cost-effective solution that would provide all its member teams with a professional look, consistent with the league’s brand image, and a myriad of interactive features to engage its youthful audience. The league was also hoping to utilize its online presence to provide additional value to its national and team-specific sponsors.
Approach: RMG3 approached these challenges with its powerful proprietary Content Management Tool: 1Touch™, which allows all the league-related sites to share a vast array of content types (text; photos; graphic, audio and video downloads; and statistical data) and to update the content themselves with a user-friendly tool that generates immediate updates to their sites. In order to increase the frequency of the content updates, RMG3 also employs its Content Production Team to source, write, edit and publish multiple stories each day to all the WUSA’s sites. And RMG3 made real-time Live Scoring and Play-by-Play possible through technological integration with the league’s third-party statistics provider, Elias. To provide the most cost-effective solution, RMG3 utilized its Customized Templates approach, providing each team with a site template based on the official league site. RMG3 then worked with each team to create different looks through the use of colors, photos, logos, fonts, and site element manipulation. RMG3 worked with the league to create locations for national sponsor promotions throughout the network of web sites, and with each of the teams to integrate their local sponsors into branded site elements. Finally, RMG3 enhanced all the sites with its User-interactive Features, such as live online chats, polls, contests, trivia games, message boards, newsletters, surveys, and occasional audio game broadcasts.
Result: The WUSA’s network of sites has a clean, user-friendly, easily navigable, professional design, with new information and activities for visitors every day. Its secure back-end handles a significant volume of content (of all content types) that is shared between all the sites. Its teams are able to have cost-efficient, professional sites that share the league’s image but which meet the needs of their local markets and team objectives. Working with league Charter Sponsor, Hyundai, in 2002, RMG3 assisted in the development and operation of an online sweepstakes that generated 50,000 entries. In 2003, when RMG3 launched its online promotion of Hyundai’s Women’s World Cup Sweepstakes on the WUSA network, entries increased 700% in five days. In addition, the sites have proved to be very popular with the league’s fans: “It kicks butt…you hit it right on!”
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