@ Feed the Bronx.
It hasn’t “just happened” that’s for sure.
There’s been a remarkable amount of work done between the club and supporters dating back to the ACL debacle when relations hit an all time low.
Meetings were held on club culture (you noticed Aloisi stopped making excuses soon after that defeat and even went as far as saying “they don’t like me making excuses” which was in response to a very public fan smashing telling him to get on with it). The club culture changed at that time and the club are to be commended for listening and acting.
The club then did a lot of things right including the obvious - no crisis. Which Pourre needs to take credit for.
The fan survey done at the time of the ACL revealed several areas the club needed to work on - ticket and membership prices were highlighted as a massive issue. The club dropped prices dramatically this year in response to this feedback. Other areas have improved like match day experience (the RSF Report is at
https://roarfans.com.au/news/rsf-release-interim-report-fan-survey/) Since March the RSF have met with the club/spoken with the club formally about 60-70 times. To put it in context the supporters have met with the club twice a week AT LEAST for the last 6 months and I can think of one period in winter where we met with the club for 8 consecutive days planning stuff for the new season.
The clubs community engagement programs as a result have been excellent.
Supporters groups get regular and direct contact with the club MD, Marketing Manager, Comms Manager (Stefanutto), Stadium Ops Mger and Membership manager. We even get to write a page in the match day program.
A serious of club/fan engagements were planned during the winter. The biggest and most obvious being the kit launch where Supporters were involved in planning the event, made banners and flags for the night, and even paid for the fireworks (not contributed to the cost but literally paid the bill with an invoice of around $4k being sent to the RSF for payment).
On that night we had players taking photographs of fans doing their stuff, how good do you think the bond between players and fans gets when that stuff happens? Imagine what 50 people were posting after that on FB etc? 50 people writing good sh*t reaches about 20,000 other people. Imagine this repeated about 10 times during the winter, what difference do you think that made?
And that’s just one part of the Supporters Group. The RSF also have u_roar which is a Supporters Group focussing on University students including international students (we even arranged 200 free tickets for them for this weekend’s games and we’ve visited 5 university campuses promoting u_roar), we have Roar Corps supporting the women, another group targeting the large Latin American community in Brisbane, we have the Supporters Group on the Gold Coast reawakening after more than s year in the dark and we have Cub Station Supporters Group targeting U12 Supporters
The supporters groups social media efforts have been huge, the combined reach of our social media last week was 100,000+ all promoting the Roar game in some way with 22,000 “engagements”. Local media don’t give us squat so we’re doing it ourselves. (Those dumb film ads we did for the kit launch reached over 25,000 people)
It’s almost and endless list and I have already gone on and on a bit too much in this post. As one last example of what we’re doing for this Sunday’s game:
- we’ve had 6,000 orange flags made up for the miniroos coming to the game and the RSF are giving them out on the plaza
- we’re giving out promotional cards on the north and south plaza
- we’ve had 100 face masks made up with Gorey’s face on it to celebrate her 100th game
- we’re making a “250” banner for Matt Mackays 250th appearance
- we’ve got 60 Orange and black flags made for the den area
- we’ve got 2-300 uni students cominf in to launch uRoar
- we’re doong face painting on the plaza pregame
- we’re doing “write a letter to your favourite player” on the plazas
- we’ve got our banners going on the scrimmage where the den is
- we’re decorating the Wally Lewis statue pregame
- we’ve got a cut out Katrina Gorry doing a lap of the stadium pre game with fans posing for photos and posting messages
- Roar fans are presenting each w league player with a team polo, paid for by fans, after the game ON the pitch
- we’ve got 10 RSF volunteers helping to hand out memberships.
- we’re running a #BringAMate campaign encouraging people to bring mates along. This seems to be working as it’s going viral.
- we’ve visited junior clubs and explained the Roar Rascals program and written their FB posts for the program
Imagine sh*t like this going on for months. Not one big thing but literally hundreds of little things over and over again with over 100 volunteers doing stuff. It feels good to support Roar 👍
The club have done their bit of course, and Supporters are doing their bit. The end result is genuine interest in the team and 15,000 people pushed through severe storms last weekend
Who knows where we’ll end up but we will keep trying.
and not everyone is aware of what’s going on, but we don’t need everyone aware, we just need a lot of people aware. Locally Roar have got a lot of cudos for last weeks attendance, most people exkected 9k.