Chester FC chief executive Mark Maguire says the club are actively looking to address the low crowds at the Lookers Vauxhall Stadium.
Despite having been in good form at home during the current National League season, Chester have struggled to break the 2,000 mark at the Lookers Vauxhall Stadium, although bumper gates for clashes with Wrexham and Tranmere Rovers have seen them average crowds of 2,102 from their 17 home games thus far.
But Maguire acknowledges that more has to be done to ensure that home gates are boosted and insists that new initiatives are in place to reach out to a wider audience.
“There has been lots of talk about tickets sales and what are we doing about increasing crowds, and we are addressing these concerns,” said Maguire.
“There are simple things that haven’t been in place. The club has never had a proper database or list of people who just come and turn up and watch the occasional game.
“We have got all of the details on season ticket holders and CFU members but we go back to them with our hand out all of the time. What we need to be doing is understanding the other people, the floating fans essentially who come to various games.
“As part of the preparations for the Tranmere game we took names and addresses of every fan who bought a ticket ad-hoc. We are now in a position where we can communicate with them, now that may seem like a simple thing from an ordinary business but as a football club we don’t use data effectively, but now we have a database.
“With the online shop and doing online ticket sales for the first time we suddenly have another 1,300 names that we can communicate with. Going forward that is massive as it means if you want to send ticket offers out or engage with them with regards to what is going on with the club then you can do and you have a new audience to do that with.”
As well as looking to increase the number of fans coming through the turnstiles at the Deva, Maguire, who has held senior roles in football with Hull City and Stockport County, says that the groundwork he has been doing since arriving at the club in June should come to fruition in the coming weeks and months.
And with the burden of ensuring Blues boss Jon McCarthy has the funds to put a competitive side on the field falling on his shoulders, Maguire knows how key it is for them to grow their commercial revenue.
He said: “A lot of work initially for me was to secure the existing relationships (with sponsors) and build on exisiting relationships to make sure they were as secure as possible for next season. Then I can start to introduce new initiatives for companies to build on the base that we’ve got.
“So really we’re in a period of time where some things should start to come to fruition and we would hope that we have an exciting couple of months on the season ticket side of things and the commercial initiatives will work in tandem with that and that should drive extra revenues that will help support Jon in the challenges that we have got.”
In an interview in last week’s Chronicle, Maguire revealed the club were looking at securing funding for a 3G training facility that would be available for community use to bring another revenue stream into the football club.
And Maguire says the other initiatives involving the usage of the stadium are in the pipeline.
“I am determined to succeed and deliver an increase for Jon,” he said.
“It is really important that we get full value out of the stadium. I know it may sound unexciting but we are on the verge of agreeing a deal to do car boot sales every week from April onwards which generate significant income for the club over the course of the summer.
“If that happens every year then suddenly you have a pot of ‘X’ amount of money that contributes. That is just one way of getting more use out of the stadium.”
