Exeter City Football Club has beaten clubs across all the football leagues to top the fan engagement index for an incredible sixth year running.
The club achieved a perfect score in the Fan Engagement Index 23/24 which provides the only objective measurement of fan engagement in English men’s football. Clubs are benchmarked against each other and recognised and rewarded for practising good fan engagement.
Exeter City lead the way with their sixth consecutive first-place finish, with Carlisle United and Lincoln City joining them in winning a gold award. Silver awards went to AFC Wimbledon, Norwich City, Cambridge United, Doncaster Rovers and Swansea City while bronze awards went to Portsmouth, Bristol Rovers, Brentford, Everton, Brighton & Hove Albion, Grimsby Town and Bristol City.
With initiatives like the new fan engagement plans being rolled out across the EFL and Premier League – and changes in regulation – including the new Independent Regulator for football – fan engagement is becoming even more important to get right for every club.
Exeter City Football Club has recently launched its Fan Engagement Plan which can be found here.
And the club’s next round table discussion, where it listens to the opinions of its supporters, takes place on September 18.
Clive Harrison, chair of Exeter City Football Club’s supporter experience committee, said: “We’re delighted to have won this award for the sixth consecutive year. As a supporter-owned club our fans are at the heart of everything we do and we continuously strive to improve both our engagement and the supporter experience at Exeter City.”
Founder of Think Fan Engagement, Kevin Rye, said, “Fan engagement is about the relationship between a club and its fans, its most important stakeholder, and fan engagement is all about how clubs listen and communicate with them. Most importantly, it’s about how they are involved in the day-to-day life of the club and the decisions that get made.
“The first thing to think about is the relationship and how it works, not what you’re selling fans or trying to monetise. Only when you’ve learned to do the basics – to listen and engage meaningfully – will you be able to do the rest well.”
The first Fan Engagement Index was published for the 2018/2019 season, and scores clubs in the top four divisions of English Football using publicly available data on their dialogue, governance and transparency in fan engagement.
Dialogue is defined as the formal conversations and meetings clubs are encouraged or required to have by the rules or expectations laid out by the EFL or Premier League, or by their own commitments; governance is the things that ‘underpin’ or make those meetings happen, or provide guarantees that engagement will happen; and transparency is whether the club lets people know what happened at those formal meetings and conversations.
The club’s next round table takes place on September 18. If you have any items that you would like to present pre-meeting, these would be very welcome, please email them to clive.harrison@ecfc.co.uk
If you are interested in taking part in a supporter round table, please complete the form here.
Places are very limited in the initial testing phase, however applications will be carried forward to future meetings.