Business analytics students uncover $1.6 million in potential revenue for the Minnesota Wild

Experiential learning is a hallmark of programs at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and now a student project project is leading to big results for one of the state’s biggest professional sports franchises.

While working on a project for the National Hockey League’s Minnesota Wild, students in the top-ranked Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program discovered the hockey team could potentially increase their revenue by $1.6 million.

“[The results] were absolutely stunning,” says Katie Vannelli, director of revenue marketing for the Minnesota Wild and one of the executive sponsors of the project.

The experiential learning project was completed through the Carlson Analytics Lab, which provides analytics consulting services to companies and organizations conducted by skilled Carlson graduate students, all under the supervision of faculty experts. 

Now in its 10th year, the Carlson MSBA program includes multiple experiential learning opportunities built into the curriculum. All students extend their classroom learning by applying their analytics knowledge to real business situations and client companies. The Minnesota Wild was one of 14 companies to sponsor a semester-long project this year. Other client companies came from a variety of industries, including retail, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, and more.

“The project came out of a need to really dive into our customer segmentation and get a more robust demographic profile of who is in our customer database,” Vannelli says. 

She wanted a robust analysis of the team’s approximately 700,000 customer records to help their small in-house email marketing team send more targeted messages and product promotions.

In particular, Vannelli wanted an analysis that combined fan segment demographics with both email engagement and ticket-buying behaviors. Vannelli challenged the students to use the de-identified dataset to answer such questions as, “How can we be more strategic with the message? Who are we sending it to? At what time? And what's the right product to put in front of someone?”

With these questions in mind, the students dove into the Minnesota Wild’s data. Armed with analytical tools and guided by faculty advisor Xuan Bi, the student team constructed an analysis framework to help the Wild understand its diverse fan base more deeply. The framework included a variety of customer types—from email subscribers who had never purchased a ticket to casual fans, and from occasional buyers to the most loyal season ticket subscribers. Using this comprehensive approach, the students identified 24 data-driven segments.

The results showed the Wild could potentially increase their revenue by $1.6 million. According to Forbes, the hockey team’s annual revenue in 2023 was $185 million, so this increase could have a major impact on the organization.

“I wanted to see demographic segments that we could use to make decisions,” Vannelli says. “They took it a step further and took it upon themselves to create action items for each segment. They came up with 24 different actionable segments, and for each and every one of them, they went into: ‘Who is the audience? What content serves the purpose for each stage of the purchase funnel?,’ and if they saw any insightful action we could take now.”

All together, the students’ data analysis and recommendations provided the Wild with an attractive return on their investment in the project.

Solid return on investment is something the Carlson Analytics Lab often delivers, according to Professor and Academic Director Ravi Bapna. “These may be student-led analytics consulting projects, but the work is high caliber and the fees are well below typical market rates for similar projects. Our client companies get to work with five or six super-bright analytics students right before they hit the job market. The project with the  Wild shows the tremendous potential of these engagements.”

Matt Wells, director of analytics for the  Wild, agrees. “The project was a runaway success,” he says. “Email is by far our most important channel. We’re going to have better communication with our fans as a result of this work.”

Ishita Chaudhary, Pranjali Gaikwad, Alisha Gupta, Mingqiang (Michael) Li, Norah Lu, and Xingyue (Cindy) Wang were all part of the student team. 

This story was adapted from the original at the Carlson School of Management.