This transcript has been lightly edited by AI
Sean: Really, we talk a lot about fan engagement and things like that when we're talking about DG sport, as it's known over in the UK. But for you, it's more players and getting people to participate more so, than cheeks on the seats, and the fans attending matches, because yours is really that grass root participation?
Tom: Yeah, so there are two key metrics in that sense. There is the participation numbers, feet on court. How many people are playing tennis on a weekly basis across the country. But we do have targets around our major events as well. So we've got five tournaments in the lead up to Wimbledon. It's like the US open series apart from they're not owned by…it's not the Wimbledon series. Those tournaments lead up to Wimbledon. So a lot of the players here, you'll get all of the US guys in Dimitrov, Federer Nadal, Murray, Kyrgios. All of these guys will probably come and practice here at some point in the couple of weeks leading up to Wimbledon. There are some great opportunities there for engagement and getting some good content there, but yeah. You're entirely right, the pure metric as it were, it's what we do is getting more people on court.
Sean: One of the things you oversaw and looked over was the new LTA website earlier in this year, what were some of the things you were looking for in going through that refresh, and what you were trying to do as far as both engage players and getting more people to play, but then also making it a bit of a portal for all those events that you're also hosting?
Tom: Sure, that's a great question. And I think one of the key challenges for a lot of governing bodies, I think what tennis Australia do superbly is break down that myth of a governing body being very statistical, and it's…traditionally a lot of NGB, national governing body websites have been very encyclopedic. It's been full of self serving content and information. So a big part of it for us was to flip it around and say, “Well what do our fans want? What do the players want? What do the coaches, the workforce, parents of children playing, what do they want?”
So it was completely refreshed on that basis. We have no qualms about…we've looked very heavily at Tennis Australia, because we see them as class leading with what they've done in terms of design for tennis. And the idea has been to break down that perception of tennis in this country. Tennis in this country is still often incorrectly labeled as an elitist sport, but it's very open, very freely available to players. There is tons of courts. It's pretty cheap to get started actually. If you got a racket and balls, and so on. So the website, it was an entry portal for people trying to get into the sport in this country, or people that wanted to be a little bit inspired, but also those that are already competing and playing, how can we enable them to increase their amount of participation or increase the amount of time they're playing.
For us, when I say enabler, that for me is a key pillar for what we do with digital in this organization. When we talk gamification and so on, we're talking real life gamification here. It's quite difficult to shift the dial and get people out onto court. Influencing behavior is quite tricky. So we see the LTA's channels, whether it's the web, whether it's social media, whether it's email, as being able to enable people to do that and remove some of those barriers. So if people can't find a court, we have a court finder tool. If they can't book a court or their time is quite precious, then we've got a court booking functionality as well now. So we're slowly turning that tanker around and saying, “Well, tennis isn't as difficult to get into as you think.” And the website's been a key part of that. It desperately needed an overhaul. So we've been live since about February now. And the software guys were in an Agile process in that sense of it reiterating and iterating again on a month to month basis.
