Overview of the Fan Engagement solution

The Fan Engagement solution of the media and entertainment accelerator includes the following features:

• An extension to Common Data Model to include concepts for fan engagement, including 60-plus new entity definitions and relationships.

• Three model-driven applications with new forms and dashboards that offer data entry and data management in support of Fan Engagement scenarios:

  • Event and venue management
  • Sports management
  • Guest management

• Two additional model-driven applications that extend the out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 Sales capabilities and customize them for media-specific product selling:

  • Media product sales and ticketing
  • Display and advertising sales

• A sample Power Apps portal, enabling self-registration of media events. Attendees can browse all upcoming events and sign up. This information is automatically captured and stored in your instance of the media-enhanced Common Data Model as new guest and registration entities. Built-in integration with Microsoft Teams enables live virtual events to be accessed by registered attendees directly through the portal.

• A solution that you can deploy and install from GitHub.

Site map extensions

With the Dynamics 365 media and entertainment accelerator, institutions can optimize fan engagement, improve interactions, profile customers and predict their actions, and gain insights from analytics. When the accelerator is installed in Dynamics 365, the experience is transformed into one specifically built for operators of theme parks, sport venues, theaters, arenas, or other places for tourism, hospitality, business conferencing, or the arts. The goal is to allow such institutions to quickly build Power Apps and Power BI visualizations.

Media and entertainment institutions can build their business processes on top of the entities in the accelerator. The ribbon customizations contain entities to record ticketing products, sponsorships, events, venues, sport teams and leagues, and more.

Entities and workflows

This accelerator provides these new Common Data Model entities to support the needs of media and entertainment businesses:

Fan and guest management entities

• Guest
• Guest category
• External guest IDs
• Interests
• Loyalty programs and levels
• Registrations
• Promotion codes

Event and venue management

• Venues
• Facilities
• Attractions, attraction tracks, and attraction schedules
• Concession stands and partners
• Gates
• Hours of operations
• Weather conditions
• Talent
• Media assets and asset categories
• Microsoft Teams integration for supporting attractions that will be live and online for remote attendees
• Portal publishing information

Sports management entities

• League
• Team
• Player
• Player team history
• Round
• Playing field
• Conference
• Division
• Season

Ticket sales

• Tickets
• Admissions
• Seat maps, seat tiers, seats, sections, and rows

Advertising sales

• Sponsorships
• Ad zones
• Ad segments and ad segment groups
• Ad spots
• TMAs (Television market areas)
• Regions
• Zip Codes

Forms and dashboards

The Dynamics 365 media and entertainment accelerator combines standard Dynamics 365 entities with customized entities to make it easier to build solutions. This section describes some of the forms, views, and dashboards that demonstrate the new entities and the data model.

Fan and guest management

The media and entertainment accelerator is intended to help successfully drive the progression of a customer from an anonymous or casual guest toward becoming a deeply engaged fan, regular attendee, subscribing member, or an active member of a frequent buyer or loyalty program. The accelerator solution helps track that journey with the addition of the new "guest" and "loyalty program" entities, which can help eventually with the conversion to leads, and then to customers and contacts.

Events and venue management

The media data entities included in the accelerator enable powerful ways to activate and connect data gathered across your entire event and venue management spectrum. This coverage includes not only scheduling industry events such as conferences, concerts, sporting events, and art festivals, but also planning all of the attractions, rides, speakers, and concession stands within a venue (such as theme parks, museums, or tourist sites).

Version 2 of the accelerator adds direct integration with Microsoft Teams so that the events and attractions can include live Teams meetings or broadcasts. These Teams meetings are automatically scheduled through the app. Once the meeting is saved, a Teams link is available that allow attendees to join in real time. This event can be optionally pushed to the event registration portal.

Event registration portal

The event and registration portal allows consumers to search for upcoming media events, view their details (dates, locations, descriptions), and register to attend the event. Consumers search for events and refine their search based on event type, location, and date. In version 2.0 of the accelerator, the Power Apps portal has been integrated with Microsoft Teams to allow attendees to join online events, concerts, or sports matches and interact with scheduled group chats, shared broadcasts, and virtual group sessions without the need for a separate Teams client.

Sports management

Key customer targets of the fan engagement scenarios within the media and entertainment accelerator are sports leagues, teams, and organizations that can use the accelerator to manage and schedule their seasons, games, players, referees, scorers, and other key officials. The accelerator adds many sports-specific data entities and relationships that enable specific use cases for the sports industry.

Media product sales

The media and entertainment accelerator can be used to easily build new product sales applications that help to promote, sell, and manage media-specific products like subscription services, ticketing, and advertising.

Ticketing and advertising sales

New ticketing data entities include the ability to build reservations and seat management solutions through seat maps. They also enable the assignment and tracking of available and blocked seat inventory used within a venue, event, or individual attraction or conference session. That in turn allows for the monetization of individual, seasonal, or group tickets to those events.

Similarly, you can build an application that enables the creation and sales of advertising display products. There's a key focus on display messaging sales at a physical venue (digital billboards, scoreboards, and other signs spread across an arena or theme park). Such an application lets you specify "what, where, and when" for display advertising, as well as to track and manage the sale and fulfillment of those advertisements and sponsorships.

Additional resources

• The media data model, solutions, data samples, Microsoft Power BI examples, SDK extensions, and more are provided as part of the open-source creative license and available on GitHub.