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Passing on my notes from last night, I probably won't have caught everything so I'll pass on the meeting minutes when they get released too.

Memberships

Not much change on that front yet, staff shortages and one bigger departure have affected the process a bit. But there is a meeting next week with Bausor for the 18-21 memberships. From getting that signed off, the Boro Pride membership will be back on the table and we'll be trying to help shape what that becomes with the Ticketing department.

Seats TLC

We've been approached by a company that worked with Motherwell on their seats and we're going to get them in to do a trial on some of our seats. It sounds like this is quite a low priority thing though. They moved the TV gantry to the other side of the stadium which they felt was a better solution from a brand perspective as you see the multiple tiered stands and the seats on that side apparently don't suffer from the same colour problems as the rest in the ground due to the way sun gets in. We said separately that it might be worth talking to some Motherwell fans about how they feel on the work that was done on their seats and in particular, to see if the stability of the seats has been affected at all.

Mobile Ticketing

So after being mentioned before on this forum, I'm happy to say that the stadium is capable of doing mobile ticketing. At the moment, the club has apparently soft-launched it and tested it. There are going to be trials for West Stand Lower North for the Peterborough and Barnsley games this time next month and the big hope is that by Christmas time, it will be working all stadium round. We've been asked also if we want to get involved by testing it out ourselves. So one game at some point soon, some of us may be asked to enter using our phone instead of our season cards and we can feed back on how it goes.

Away Day Tickets

There were some issues early on with Fulham and Derby games. Fulham it seemed like it was going to be a one off but apparently Derby are an absolute shambles to deal with at the moment. Everyone knows the situation they're in publicly at the moment so I don't think this will come as a huge shock to anyone but they seem to be running on empty behind the scenes in respects like ticketing.

Season and Matchday Ticketing

As mentioned earlier, I got the opportunity to speak about this research I'd done yesterday. First up, on season tickets, the club isn't hugely concerned with new season tickets, the club and Gibson from the top down are very much on the rewarding loyalty end of the spectrum over new buyers. So what they are happy with is their renewal prices and our early-bird pricing in general, they believe this is where logistically we level out a bit. I don't have the data to compare this as early-bird prices are harder to find for a lot of clubs but they think we look rosier in that respect.

Also on the walk-up prices, I mentioned how we are one of the most expensive clubs in the league and they want to have a look at what I've come up with to come to that conclusion basically. So I'm gonna clean up the research I've done and at some point send it across to the rest of the fans group and then that should get passed on to the club before the next meeting.

EDIT: Was also a good point raised by Rob from FMTTM about our ticket prices with regards to away fans attending our ground. We haven't had a great deal of fans take up the offer of coming up north this season so far and ticket prices are surely a factor in that. If we're going to keep dedicating such a large section to them, we should be looking into whether fans attend other games in higher numbers than they do for us.

There is talks of an extra meeting just to focus on ticketing too. There's a lot of other things to talk about in these meetings and the MFC people can't always commit to the longer meetings (last night they had to leave for the U23s game after half an hour). So we're hoping to have a proper meeting just about ticketing and we as the fans groups want to make sure we come into that well prepared. That involves doing things like I've done but will probably also involve some kind of ticketing survey which we want to be huge and get in a ton of opinions. Which brings me onto...

Fans Experience Survey

You may have completed the fans survey MSF put out recently which was about the experience of being back at the Riverside. We had a look through the responses and it was amazing. People not just taking the time to do the multiple choice questions but also a lot of written feedback on various things, particularly focused on the concourse. It's because of this that we're hoping to get another survey going regarding ticketing, we hope we can get even more responses for this one as we need as much ammunition as possible to back up the Ticketing guys in their fight for better solutions. I mentioned earlier, I don't get the sense from Lee (Head of Ticketing) that he's happy with where we are overall, the problem seems to be getting solutions approved higher up; thus the mention of 'being creative with tickets' from the last meeting I wasn't part of.

Concourses

So as mentioned, lot of responses on the surveys about concourses. The biggest thing to note here is that the club are struggling with staff shortages in this area and a lot of this seems to come from the post-pandemic situation. For a start, the staff we do have have been affected by the pingdemic so we're not always working at capacity. But even if we were, recruitment hasn't gone as well as they'd hope for this season on the concourses. They expected to get big take up on jobs but it hasn't really happened. This means they've had to limit what's on offer.

Also, fans have mentioned the closure of the Heineken bars. Well it turns out there's a couple of issues there. For a start, like everybody else, Heineken are struggling with a lack of actual product at the moment. But the other big issue is that apparently these bars used to do plastic bottles of Heineken? Well Heineken from the top down has gone away from this in a decision to cut down plastic usage. So anyone running a plastic bottle Heineken bar will be in a similar position to us. Add to this the staff shortages and we probably couldn't run them even if everything else was in place. So those are the issues but the solutions are hopefully there too when the product becomes more widely available again. Apparently we can set up smart pulling or whatever it is they do relatively easily? So fingers crossed they'll be back in the future. They look like an eye-sore at the moment though.

On COVID, we've been approached by a company who do sanitisers who have said we can have as many sanitisers as we want. Apparently the club were expecting the sanitisers we had set up to be empty by the end of games but there's literally been about 5% usage of each one. Which says one of or a mixture of two things: the fans aren't using them when they see them and/or the fans can't see them. Going by the survey responses, the latter seems to be a big problem, I noted for example that I never saw a single one in the North Stand concourse from the moment I got into the stadium. But these ones we've been offered apparently are quite big things so they should stand out and hopefully if we get these set up, the uptake in using them will be bigger.

PA System

The PA system had a few comments too from fans saying it was too loud. Well there's been mixed responses so what we really need is for fans who have the problem to get in touch either via us with MSF or with Supporter Services and they should be able to figure out where the problem areas in the ground are. The lads from MFC noted they're pitch side on matchdays and they don't actually think it's that loud from where they are but one of the other MSF reps mentioned it was loud in another area of the ground. So it's case-by-case, please bring it up if it's a problem for you in whatever area you sit.

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That was about it from the talks we had with MFC. So the rest is stuff we chatted amongst ourselves about:

Boro Fusion + 16-21 MSF rep

We're going to try and get a representative from Boro Fusion to have a BAME representative in the group. We're also asking to see if we can get some form of 16-21 representative in the meetings on occasion to get views from fans of that age group.

Foodbank Collections

Apparently been a while since we did this but we're going to be talking to shops in the local area to see if they can put some pallets out for people to put some extra shopping in as they're on their shopping trip. Also talk about seeing if we can get a van round to do collections for people who don't want to carry things to the stadium on matchdays.

Kieran Scott

We are going to ask the question to see if we can get a meeting set up with Scott and MSF, which I am excited about the potential for!

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Last couple of things, the two things I didn't raise were the COVID spot-checks (as the government looks like its reneging on the COVID passports, I don't think we're going to see that come off in the EFL) and I didn't get a good opportunity to ask about the Away kits voting mentioned earlier so I'll keep that on my list to hopefully bring up next time.

Any questions or comments on any of the above, please let me know. All part of the conversation! UTB

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Great feedback Wilson. 

I left feedback about the PA system being too loud. Block 13 for me. I noticed a couple of times them turning the volume up as well. It was already loud, then you hear it crank up to extra loud and you have to give up on any conversation you were trying to have with people round you. 

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50 minutes ago, edinboro said:

Hell of a lot of information there for 30 mins. Really interesting stuff.

Yeah, they were there for about 30 minutes and we were in it for another hour chatting amongst ourselves, in particular about how we want to approach ticketing but a few other issues too. Certainly helped going through the previous meeting's minutes in advance in order to make the most of the time with the MFC lads.

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10 hours ago, Brunners said:

Unfortunately @Willdidn't get the answer he wanted on his yorkshire puddings, so don't be surprised if he's a bit grumpy for a while guys.

I don't want to talk about it

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17 hours ago, boro-unger said:

Great feedback Wilson. 

I left feedback about the PA system being too loud. Block 13 for me. I noticed a couple of times them turning the volume up as well. It was already loud, then you hear it crank up to extra loud and you have to give up on any conversation you were trying to have with people round you. 

Just to say I've mentioned this in our group so it should get passed on. I think the woman who also mentioned it on Monday is in a similar area to the ground as you looking at the stadium plan so it might well be that end of the ground.

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1 minute ago, Changing Times said:

I was just reading on FMTTM about the MDSA raising money for a new bus.  Was that discussed at all?  I would have thought the club could help with that?

Not at this meeting but I can ask in the group to see if it has been mentioned before.

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Quick update from me, just letting you all know that I should be handling general posting from the https://boro.support/ website now so I should be able to inform you all pretty much exactly as the minutes get pushed live!

And with that being the case, a few posts I've pushed up today:

The official minutes from the latest meeting, Monday 13th September: https://boro.support/middlesbrough-supporters-forumminutes-45/

The Return to the Riverside Survey results: https://boro.support/return-to-riverside-survey-results/

The 3pm TV Blackout Survey results: https://boro.support/3pm-tv-blackout-survey-results/

I've asked the other MSF members also about this but any feedback on how the posts look please let me know. Not talking about grand scale website changes here, more formatting and making sure the information is clear and easy to read. I can do some general text-editing for the posts if anyone has any feedback. 👍

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/13/2021 at 5:52 PM, wilsoncgp said:

Just wanted to share this last one too. Not much changes in terms of order as you add extra kids but this is how the table looks ordered from most expensive to cheapest possible in the first column with the Family Zone pricing in place for us. We're still always in 2nd place, we are the 2nd most expensive day out in the Championship for a family even if they can get tickets 6 tickets together in our dedicated family zone.

image.thumb.png.285e27d3232406468f48554443f2e35c.png

First and foremost excellent work. 
Just curious but if you factored in a north south earning divide, we all know the South earn more and cost more, then I wonder how this would change results.  

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13 minutes ago, sanddancer said:

First and foremost excellent work. 
Just curious but if you factored in a north south earning divide, we all know the South earn more and cost more, then I wonder how this would change results.  

Well this is part of the problem SD. How is it that Middlesbrough fans end up having to pay more for tickets than QPR, Fulham, Birmingham and Millwall.

This week I've gone through and tried to get sources to match up to the ticket work I've done and wrote up a little document contextualising the data a bit. I've passed this onto the rest of the MSF reps and needless to say, they're all really aghast at where we sit in these tables. Hopefully we'll get to talk about this a little at the next meeting.

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  • boro-unger changed the title to Middlesbrough Supporters Forum

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