Hawthorn FC partners with Benchvote to drive grassroots campaign

Hawthorn has signed digital campaign platform, Benchvote, to power their grassroots football campaign Pick My Club and promote Victoria's Eastern Football League (EFL).

In 2018, Hawthorn signed a two-year partnership with the EFL with the aim of formally working together to create a stronger alignment between elite and grassroots AFL in Melbourne’s Eastern suburbs.

Benchvote has now been tasked with helping Hawthorn leverage social media to help the club learn where their grassroots support is hailing from on social media.

The Pick My Club campaign gives fans the opportunity to vote for their EFL club with the club that receives the most votes winning $5000, Sherrin branded footballs and a signed Hawthorn guernsey.

Benchvote founder, Adam Mussa explained "working with Hawthorn gives us the opportunity to roll out this new addition to our fan engagement and data acquisition platform that truly leverages social media to increase campaign performance while reducing the need for ad spend.

“This is an excellent campaign to build grassroots awareness, and at the same time it helps Hawthorn capture data to get more insights into where their supporters are from.”

The first 2000 voters will receive a free ticket to the round 15 AFL clash between Hawthorn and West Coast Eagles at the MCG on Saturday 29th June, with the competition winner to be announced at the game.

For this campaign, Benchvote will debut their new social referral engine, which rewards and incentivises entrants to share the competition with their friends and family over social media for more entries.

Amber Wayn, Hawthorn’s Digital Marketing Executive added “benchvote’s solution for our Pick My Club comp provided two key features not available in our previous platform, that’s visual voting options and incentivised shareability.

“Both have been key to the success of our campaign.

“Adam knows his stuff when it comes to data capture and user experience and we love how our competition looks and behaves for our front-end users, and the back-end reports allow us to understand exactly how things are tracking.”

BenchVote is an fan engagement and digital activations platform designed for sporting organisations, governing bodies and brands to engage their fans, drive revenue and collect data as part of a campaign, or across the whole season.

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