NC Fusion expands youth marketing outreach, taught kids leadership and life skills with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Challenges scaling marketing campaigns

The principal challenge of NC Fusion’s small team is delivering dynamic sports experiences across a kaleidoscope of different audience segments, each with demographics and behavior in need of tailored messaging. Additional obstacles included obtaining a unified view of customer data and the ability to scale up content production to meet the complex needs of various segments in each marketing effort. As its broad audience-targeted outreach fueled greater demand, it was increasingly difficult for the club to increase content production and target the proper segment with the appropriate messaging strategy. Targeted audiences and content include engagement of new families, curated newsletter updates focused on sponsors and donors, and gender-specific and player-specific engagement to encourage youth to “get back in the game.”

Chris Barnhart, Head of IT and Data Systems at NC Fusion, believes cross-platform communication is critical in driving its mission but saw obstacles. In its attempts to scale up content production, the sports club used disparate data sources and tooling. As Barnhart explains, “None of our systems talked to each other, and we relied on human intervention. Data was scattered across multiple platforms—and there was no holistic status view of our data.” This was problematic because messaging could not be tailored to the right audience segment. Messaging is especially sensitive when it's geared toward providing parents and kids with guidance and support, focused on developing a community centered on nourishing intentional youth sports experiences.

Orchestrating customer journeys was a laborious manual process with few efficiencies. Creating emails needed hours of client meetings to carefully prepare a messaging strategy. Knowledge of structured data models to create messaging segments was limited to a lengthy, inefficient manual process of “playing with the data.” NC Fusion urgently needed a unified lens to discover data insights and begin scaling up essential membership and fundraising efforts. It also needed to eliminate siloed data and integrate different data sources to better inform its marketing campaigns with fresh insights. After the organization tested competitive solutions, the value of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights stood out with its data integration capabilities across data sources and access to a unified data dashboard.

Unifying data, creating quality content faster

NC Fusion incorporated Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into current workflows and used journey orchestration and customer data platform benefits to gain a unified lens across its marketing data. Barnhart says, “Rolling out the Microsoft solution was easy. I rolled out Dynamics 365 Customer Insights all at once with no hiccups.”

The club took advantage of powerful integration features to collect disparate marketing data sources into a unified view. To represent NC Fusion’s data sources in a single dashboard, the club used the native interoperability of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights with Microsoft Dataverse to allow external access to a PlayMetrics player registration dataset, which it brought into a SQL Server database. NC Fusion also used data visualizations in Power BI to gain fresh real-time insights to inform marketing campaign results in need of improvement and even create new sports-centered programs! Barnhart says, "We were able to visualize the point where players were dropping out of sports. This led to our creation of the 'Women in Sports' initiative. Now, the club’s campaign communication efforts can scale up membership outreach activities that speak to the needs of both internal and external audiences. For example, NC Fusion's "Women in Sports" campaign amplified awareness of the number of benefits team sports bring to the individual athlete. The club used Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to target audiences, address inconsistent data, and more quickly and economically create content that drove higher engagement.

Scoring big with less effort with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

NC Fusion uses journey orchestration with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to quickly produce more content, increase reach, and better target audience segments with personalized messaging. As a result, the club has become more productive, generating personalized, audience-crafted content faster by using natural language prompts to create email campaigns and segments. Barnhart says, "For families, we are able to tailor the message they receive. This means a family will only receive messages that apply to their family situation, and not a multitude of emails that have no application to their family situation." Using AI-enabled content ideas, descriptions, and summaries has provided significant time savings, and targeted content campaigns have been more productive. Shortly after testing the Copilot capabilities in early 2023, NC Fusion was so impressed that it evolved its internal processes to optimize for how the AI-powered assistant works. The club now takes in the main campaign requirements from key internal stakeholders and simply feeds them into Copilot.

Nearly a year later, NC Fusion has used AI-generated content ideas to accelerate campaign creation by 75 percent. Barnhart reveals that "Using query assist capabilities in Copilot, the club is creating audience segments faster. With AI-assisted content production, our customer engagement has increased from 10 percent to 30 percent." Summarizes Barnhart, "We are a very small team, but need to show up like a pro sports organization, so enabling me to significantly reduce the time it takes me to create emails and journeys has been a big win. For a standard email, it might have taken me about one hour before; now it takes about 10 minutes." As a result, Barnhart is able to deliver campaigns once stuck in the backlog of work requests from other stakeholders and better service the club’s varied audiences. Despite the size of its organization, NC Fusion reaped the benefits of being able to produce high-quality content—tailored to specific parameters across its marketing plan—with Copilot.

Effective campaigns for an expansive mission

The benefits that Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Copilot are providing for NC Fusion are greater than simple process improvements to the club’s marketing content production. Using the solution, NC Fusion can now launch successful marketing campaigns that it couldn't approach before as a small organization. The club is forging ahead with plans to further integrate the use of generative AI within marketing communications workflows. With the time it saves with Copilot, NC Fusion can spend more time on its mission to create more youth engagement in sports. The organization’s vision for AI focuses on creating agile, AI-enabled content that holistically benefits the youth sports community.  NC Fusion reaps the benefits of the seamless creation of customer journeys, newsletters, and emails. Barnhart has produced faster, more consistent marketing campaigns using the time-saving benefits of generative AI-created content. 

NC Fusion continues to sprint ahead—aiming to create intentional youth sports experiences that build character and community. It uses data to transform how it connects with people and to be more efficient now that it’s equipped with a unified platform with comprehensive Copilot capabilities. The time-saving benefits of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights inspired Barnhart to introduce Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales into daily workflows to support its fundraising and sponsorship efforts. Seeking to replicate his success with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights in other areas, Barnhart maintains, “I’m rolling this out to our sales team in March. My experience points to the same results for our sales team. They are very excited with the connectivity between Outlook, Sales, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.” Barnhart’s larger mission continues to be connecting with youth—and making connections with meaningful content that inspires kids: “We exist to instill in kids that teamwork is beneficial. You learn to be a better person in life—to cooperate, communicate, lead, win, and lose. Winning is easy, but losing is tough, and everybody has lost at some point in life. In college and careers, we all face opposition. Don’t fold. It’s all part of life, and a win is around the corner.” 

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