Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC and Pittsburgh Riveters SC are a men's professional soccer team and a women's pre-professional soccer team, each with its own set of fans, rhythm, and reasons to show up. The marketing team had done a great job building a strong digital footprint: extensive email marketing lists, a full range of social platforms, and a strong paid media presence. With such a community-oriented approach, the one piece missing was a way to text fans and listen when fans text back.
When the team started using Community for text marketing, they quickly realized the power of segmentation for engagement and conversions. By leaning into how fans were responding to their texts, and tailoring their messaging accordingly, the Riverhounds reshaped their texting program.
Challenge
Email and social media had taken the Riverhounds far, but social media blasted the same message to everyone and emails hid in fans' inboxes. Social posts reached thousands of people at once, with no way to tell which fans cared about $1 Beer Night and which showed up for the fireworks, let alone reach each group with a message built for them. Emails sat in an inbox that fans checked on their own schedule, if ever.
Solution
The Riverhounds build their subcommunities one campaign at a time. Every response and click from their audience is a data point. Fans who click a fireworks-night link go into one group while those who open but don't click go into another. The $1 Beer Night campaign targets members who are 21 and older, and those who engage with it are grouped separately from fans who respond to soccer-specific content. Over time, this produces an accurate map of what each member wants, not based on assumptions, but actual behavior.
Community enables the Riverhounds to identify their most active fans, like those who have shown repeated intent by either browsing for tickets, looking at merch, or engaging with recent sends. From there, the team tailors their messages to match fans' interests, which drives higher engagement, more data, and increasingly better performance. They also split every campaign by team affinity, using exclusion lists to keep either audience from getting content they didn't sign up for.
- Fireworks
- $1 Beer Night
- Tickets
- Merchandise
- Riverhounds
- Riveters
- Birthdays
A small automated touch, the birthday workflow, sends a personal message to any member with a birthday on file. It's a low lift campaign that reaches fans on a special day and means a lot to them.
Impact
Segmentation has changed their campaign results significantly. By breaking down their audience of over 26,000 subscribed fans into smaller interest-based groups, and sending around 6,000 texts at a time, the Riverhounds now see campaigns go from a 24% to between 80% and 90% click-through rate on some targeted sends.
Concession promos, gameday updates, postgame fireworks, ticket BOGOs, and collectible giveaways are some examples of campaigns run through Community, and each performs best when it reaches the members most likely to act on it. A concession promo sent to fans who've clicked on similar offers before converts at a higher rate than the same message sent to the full list, proof that relevance, not the offer itself, drives the results.
“Community is a more direct point of interaction with our audience. It's even more personal than email, because it's not going to an inbox you check once a day. It's going directly to where you talk to your friends, your family, anyone you're close to. I think that's super special.”
The team tracks fans' engagement from first touch to conversion, whether that starts with a QR code scanned in the stadium or a sign-up on the website. That tracking is already paying off. When the Riverhounds launched their 2027 season ticket interest form, they pushed it through Community and started seeing conversions come back directly attributed to the text send.
For a front office running two fan bases on one platform, the lesson is a simple one: a program built on what fans respond to outperforms generic blasts many times over.
