St George Illawarra Dragons: Getting to Know Our Fans Better

For the St George Illawarra Dragons, fan engagement isn’t just about likes, clicks, or surface-level participation. It’s about understanding their supporters and building long-term relationships.

As Head of Marketing & Insights Emily Cheyne explains, the team’s priority is to “get to know our fans better.” That means:

• Growing the club’s owned audience by converting social followers into known email contacts
• Collecting richer fan data to enable meaningful segmentation and personalisation

This dual objective underpins the club’s commercial strategy. With email as their most effective channel for merchandise sales, increasing the number of contacts and improving the relevance of communications directly supports revenue growth.

Campaignware plays a key role in helping the Dragons achieve both sides of this equation. 

By offering interactive, easy-to-launch activations, the platform enables the team to engage fans in fun ways while simultaneously gathering the data they need to deliver more tailored and commercially impactful experiences.

“We’re trying to get our fans interacting with us, because I think as a brand we’re quite good at just talking to our fans or being very transactional — so it’s just about making it more interactive.”

— Emily Cheyne, Head of Marketing & Insights, St George Illawarra Dragons

Campaigns That Reflect the Brand and Connect the Fans

The Dragons use Campaignware across multiple departments, deploying a mix of always-on engagement, data-driven activations, and brand-led storytelling campaigns.

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Recurring activations like Moment of the Month, Members Around the World, and Most Valuable Pet keep fans regularly involved, often by encouraging them to share their own stories, photos, and club pride. These initiatives are not only effective at growing engagement, but also deeply aligned with the club’s brand values:

• Courage, shown on the field but hard to express digitally
• Connection, between the club and its community
• Passion, rooted in history and handed down through generations

Campaignware activations, especially those that invite fans to share personal stories or memories, give life to these values. A great example was the “Share Your Favourite Moment” campaign, where fans submitted photos and reflections from the club’s last 25 years — from childhood matches to the 2010 grand final.

Another standout campaign was the “Team Picker”, which used Campaignware’s Fan Wall template to let fans select and justify their ideal starting lineup. The campaign generated over hundreds of unique entries, while also enriching hundreds more by capturing 25 new data records, and produced highly visual, user-generated content.

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Submissions were repurposed across social media and on the match day big screen, tying digital engagement directly into the club’s game day experience.

These campaigns are quick to produce, typically built in under 30 minutes, and easily adapted across different parts of the business. Their simplicity means more departments can participate, while the quality of output continues to enhance marketing, fan engagement, and internal reporting.

From Engagement to Insight and Revenue

Campaignware has played a critical role in helping the Dragons close the gap between their social following and email database, creating more opportunities to connect with fans through their highest-performing revenue channel: email.

Beyond email acquisition, the platform enables the club to capture structured data (including date of birth, location, and fan preferences) that powers more relevant and effective marketing. One example: birthday emails sent using Campaignware-collected data achieved a 12x higher click-through rate than standard hospitality emails.

To scale these efforts, the Dragons have implemented a central data warehouse and marketing automation platform, allowing them to segment and personalise communications based on the information gathered through Campaignware campaigns.

They’re also surfacing useful strategic insights — for example, that fans who engage with Campaignware activations tend to skew younger than their broader database. This is helping inform content strategies, tone of voice, and campaign themes across the club’s digital efforts.

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While attribution can be complex across systems, the marketing team sees Campaignware as a key contributor to both their revenue outcomes and their long-term brand strategy, enabling them to speak to more fans, in more meaningful ways, more often.

A Tool That Works Across the Club

Internally, Campaignware has become a go-to platform for quick, creative fan engagement across multiple areas of the business. Its flexibility makes it useful not just for marketing, but also for:

• Membership: where activations help upgrade fans to club members driving greater connection and revenue
• Content: where submissions through Campaignware is turned into UCG and being repurposed for big screens and in-stadium engagement as well as across digital channels
• Sponsorship: an area The Dragons are now exploring thanks to the value that the additional engagement and data brings to the table.

The ease of use combined with its ability to collect actionable data has made Campaignware a valuable internal asset, enabling the Dragons to run more campaigns with less friction, and with clearer outcomes.

Whether it’s celebrating legacy moments, collecting fan votes, or launching tactical promotions, Campaignware supports the club’s goal to get closer to its supporters and understand them better with every interaction.

“If we didn’t have Campaignware, we wouldn’t have a tool to run digital fan engagement like this. It’s given us another arm, outside of just posting on socials,  to create meaningful interactions and then continue the conversation by collecting data.”

— Emily Cheyne

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