I help sports and entertainment properties close the gap between a packed arena and a broken digital experience, so every fan becomes someone you know, keep, and can prove the value of.
Most teams can count the crowd. Few can name a single fan in it: what she buys, how often she comes back, or when she's about to leave. Fanography is the research discipline that closes that gap, pairing deep fan research with product strategy so your digital experience earns the loyalty your arena already has.
The study of fans as people, not ticket counts: who they are, what drives them, and what keeps them coming back.
A research-based portrait of your fan base, built to guide product, marketing, and sponsorship decisions.
An audit or insight grounded in observed fan behavior, not assumptions or vanity metrics.
A decade-plus of behavioral research, now focused entirely on the fan relationship.
Every team sits somewhere on this ladder. The question isn't how many fans you have. It's how much of each fan relationship you actually own, and whether you can turn it into revenue a sponsor will pay for.
Fans live on league, ticketing, and social platforms you don't control.
You have your own tools, but they don't talk to each other.
Some fan data flows between systems, but there's no single view of a fan yet.
One first-party record per fan, across every touchpoint.
Fan data answers a sponsor's question with a number instead of a vibe.
A data ownership index for team and league apps. It grades every team on two separate axes, data ownership and experience quality, and plots them on one grid, so teams can see exactly where they stand against their peers.
A live, public audit series that follows a single fan job from start to finish across a sports property's digital products, checkpoint by checkpoint, grounded only in what was directly observed.
Each engagement builds on the last, from a single talk to research and frameworks your team uses every season.
A focused session for a league off-site, a conference, or your internal team on why fan data ownership matters more than fan data volume, and what a sticky team app looks like beyond tickets and schedules.
An audit of your digital and data gaps across product, engineering, and UX, with a prioritized roadmap and a clear read on how much of your fan relationship you own versus rent.
Ongoing fan research that feeds every decision: segmentation, the casual-to-season-ticket journey, app experience, and the audience evidence that makes the sponsorship case.
The system built during our work, licensed back to your organization and improved over time, so it compounds instead of going stale in a shared drive.
I'm Devin Wallace-Williams, PhD, a behavioral researcher and product strategist. I've spent my career studying why people start, stay, and stop, at Meta, at Zillow, and in federal research, and turning that evidence into product decisions.
I'm also a Dallas Wings season ticket holder. The ticketing, the app, and the digital experience around the game I love didn't talk to each other. That gap isn't unique to one team. It's the pattern across women's sports, which has the moment but not yet the infrastructure to match it.
Fanography is how I help teams close that gap, as the engaged fan I actually am.
I write about product strategy, fan data, and the business of women's sports on Substack.
What a season ticket holder sees when the game is great and the digital experience isn't.
Launching a team app is step one. Making it the center of the fan relationship is the real work.
Why the first team in each market to prove its fan value will set the price for everyone else.
Four real fan tasks, graded A through F, during the ten days the season went quiet.
If you lead fan experience, digital, partnerships, or strategy at a team, league, or venue, I'd like to hear what you're working on.