Data Architecture · Segmentation Logic · Automation Pipeline · CRM Integration
Mamelodi Sundowns FC is one of the most successful and widely supported football clubs on the African continent with a fanbase that spans South Africa and beyond. Like many large sports organisations, the club had built a significant following but had limited infrastructure to understand, segment, and communicate with that audience in a meaningful way.
Supporter data existed — collected through surveys, ticketing, merchandise purchases, and event attendance — but it sat largely unactivated. Communication to fans was broad and untargeted, and the club had no systematic way to understand who their supporters were, where they came from, or what kind of engagement would be most relevant to each group.
Raiis was engaged to build the intelligence and automation layer that would turn that raw data into a structured, actionable engagement system.
The challenge was not a lack of data but rather a lack of structure. Supporter information had been collected across multiple touchpoints in inconsistent formats: survey responses with open-ended fields, attendance records, merchandise transaction histories, and demographic information gathered at different times and through different channels.
Without a unified system to ingest, clean, and interpret this data, the club's marketing and communications team could not confidently answer basic questions: Who are our most engaged supporters? Where do the majority of our fans live? Which segments are buying merchandise but not attending matches? What message should we send to a supporter in Pretoria versus one in Durban?
The absence of answers to these questions meant every communication campaign was a broad broadcast — the same message to every supporter, regardless of who they were or what their relationship with the club looked like.
The objective was to give Mamelodi Sundowns a supporter intelligence capability that didn't previously exist — and to automate the marketing actions that intelligence should trigger.
Specifically, the system needed to:
The broader goal was to shift the club's supporter communication from broadcast to precision — moving from "send this to everyone" to "send this to the right people at the right time."
Raiis designed and built a two-layer system: a data intelligence platform that processes and segments supporter information, and an automation layer that activates that intelligence through targeted communication workflows.
The ingestion pipeline connects to the club's survey and data sources, cleans incoming records, and standardises them into a unified supporter profile format. From there, a segmentation engine automatically classifies supporters into cohorts — groupings based on behavioural signals like attendance frequency, merchandise purchase history, geographic location, and survey response patterns. These cohorts are dynamic: as new data comes in, supporter profiles update and segments adjust accordingly.
On top of the segmentation layer, Raiis built automated campaign workflows that trigger based on cohort membership. A supporter identified as a regular match attendee in Gauteng receives different communication to a merchandise buyer in the Western Cape who has never attended a match. Each workflow is configured to send the appropriate content through the appropriate channel at the appropriate time — without a team member having to manually build and send each campaign.
The club's marketing team now has visibility into who their supporters are at a level that wasn't previously possible, and the system handles the execution of targeted communication automatically — freeing the team to focus on strategy and content rather than logistics.
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