Monday 22nd March 2021
DUMBARTON FC expresses sincere thanks to all those who recently undertook our online survey.
We were fortunate that Murray Stewart volunteered to give up his own time to help us create the survey and enable us to get it on line as well as collate the responses.
Murray, who has a Masters Degree in Sports Management, did a very professional job in supporting the team in completing the activity so many thanks to Murray.
We are in the process of a detailed review of the feedback and prioritising it to help us formulate the programs and initiatives to achieve our objective.
That goal is to be a much more integrated part of the community and with that achieving greater attendances and expanded fan base.
We will be communicating actions being taken to address issues and concerns raised as well as driving programs to help achieve our longer term objectives.
Here is some initial feedback and observations we gleaned from the survey. These include a lot of positive comments, opportunities to communicate better and areas for us to follow up on.
Positives
– Fans clearly take great pride in supporting Dumbarton.
– Almost 80 per cent of respondents found the club welcoming with many mentioning a big change in the last three years. We are working on understanding how we can address the views of the other 20 per cent.
– The majority of fans felt the pricing was “cheap or fair”. There was a small minority who felt pricing was expensive specifically in non adult ticket pricing. We believe our recent under 16 free season ticket initiative will help address this.
– Over 75 per cent of respondents felt the club catered for all fans. While positive we need to focus on understanding the 25 per cent who did not believe this to be the case. A major issue raised was Youth Engagement again we hope our under 16s initiative partly addresses this.
Opportunities for improvement and feasibility reviews
– Ability to have a flexible season ticket
– Providing improved match day atmosphere and entertainment. Both on and off the field!
– Improve the pre and post match activities in the community suite e.g. music, live football on TV
– Create a terracing or safe standing area
Other comments
There were a number of responses suggesting free tickets for schools and clubs. We thought we did a relatively good job in that but obviously need to do better. Those included:
For the last few years under 12s have been able to apply for a free season ticket. As above, a few months ago we were delighted to announce that we expanded that initiative to under 16s.
The club, through Joe McCaughey, regularly takes school, youth football clubs and groups for matchday stadium tours, providing information and inspiration about the history of Dumbarton FC, and how sport (and football in particular) has played a significant role in Dunbartonshire/Argyll and Bute over the years. This ties in with our community tickets initiative.
A number of suggestions, asked to let visiting fans in the community suite. This is something we have been doing for a number of seasons, unless the game is deemed a higher risk game due to numbers and specific visiting support.
In terms of demographics of those who filled in the survey, there were a few trends that reinforced our need to focus on specific opportunities to increase our appeal:
Less than 10 per cent of our respondents were female. While we have a good number of loyal female supporters (including our Trust Board Director), how do we make the match day more appealing to female fans?
Only 11 per cent of respondents were under 24. We need to do more to encourage that age group to get more involved at DFC.
The vast majority of respondents were Dumbarton fans. How do we encourage non-Dumbarton fans to get involved and become part of the proud Dumbarton support?
Again, we thank everyone for the time taken to fill in the survey, including the individual who identified as a house plant!
Due to the volume of responses the above items don’t cover all the issues raised though they do cover the key ones.
We will continue to use the responses in our initiatives and prioritisation as fan/customer feedback is key and keep you informed.
Dumbarton Football Club