How Can a Small Club Analyze Fan Feedback on a Small Budget?
A 66-game season of written fan comments fits inside a $299 plan. Here is how to size it, what it costs over a year, and when to move up.
A small club can analyze every fan comment for $299 a month: export the comments your ticketing company's survey already collects, run them through Dimension Labs' Explore plan, and read one report per homestand that says what fans praised, what they complained about, and whether it changed. For a minor league team or a small venue that wants every written answer read the same way all season and turned into reports the front office and each department can use, Dimension Labs is the strongest fit at that price, because it reads every comment on every channel, enriches each one with Dimensions, and builds the reports for you. A 66-game season of written comments fits inside the entry plan with room to spare, as the sample below shows.
This post is about budget and sizing. For the nightly mechanics of a post-game report, see how to turn a post-game fan survey into a report in hours, and for tying comments to the renewal list, how sports teams connect fan feedback to ticket renewals.
Our ticketing company already sends basic surveys. Is deeper fan analysis worth paying for?
Keep the survey you have. The ticketing survey is a good collector: it reaches every buyer, and the scores it charts tell you whether a game went well. What it usually leaves on the table is the written answer box, which is where fans say why. The Mariners put the problem plainly: "We have all these scores and numerics… we really don’t understand why they go up and down." (Chris Kennedy, SVP of Business Strategy & Analytics)
Deeper analysis is worth paying for when at least one of these is true:
Written comments pile up and nobody reads all of them, so the loudest fan or the latest email decides what gets fixed.
A score drops and the meeting turns into a debate about why.
Concessions, operations and marketing each want their own answer from the same survey.
You plan a price change, a new promotion night or a renewal push and want to know what fans said last time.
If a game brings in a dozen comments and one person reads them all that evening, a spreadsheet is enough for now. A club passes that point once a season of comments has to be compared month to month, and that comparison is where a fixed set of labels pays for itself: a theme counted the same way in April and August is a trend you can act on. A Mariners analyst describes the payoff: "Dimension Labs unlocks the ability to maximize the potential usage of a survey." (Kobe Sarausad, Analyst of Revenue Insights)
How much fan feedback fits in a $299 plan?
Explore covers 1,000 conversations a month, and one survey response, review or email counts as one conversation. Each one gets up to 10 Dimensions from the pre-built library, and reports from the agent are unlimited. In the first month you get three times your limits, which is room to load last season's comments as a baseline. Files you add only as context, such as the game schedule with attendance and promotions, are free up to 25,000 rows.
Published plan terms, read November 9, 2026
What the $299 Explore plan includes
The four allowances that decide whether a club's fan comments fit the entry plan.
To size your own club, count written answers, not survey invitations. Fans who give only a score do not need text analysis. In the sample club below, 45 written comments a home game over a 66-game season peaks at 585 in a month, 58.5% of the Explore limit. The whole season is 2,970 comments, so last season fits inside the 3,000 conversations of month one.
Sample data, fictional club
A 66-game season of fan comments never reaches the 1,000-a-month limit
Written survey comments a month for a fictional minor league club: 45 comments a home game, plus a 600-response season-ticket member survey in November. Explore covers 1,000 conversations a month.
Above the limit, you move to the next plan for that month, prorated, and you get an alert at 80% first; your data is never stopped. A club with bigger crowds or a long answer box can start on Explore and let the first month's numbers tell it whether to stay.
What does each option cost over a season?
Explore is $299 a month, or $2,990 a year billed annually, which is $598 less than twelve monthly payments. Monthly plans have no contract after the 14-day trial, so a club can start monthly and move to annual once the reports have earned their place.
Published prices, our arithmetic
A year of Explore costs $2,990 billed annually, or $3,588 paid monthly
Twelve months on each plan a club might consider, and what the step up adds.
| Plan | 12 months | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Explore $299 a month | $3,588 monthly or $2,990 annual | 1,000 a month; pre-built Dimensions; unlimited reports |
| Discover $999 a month | $9,990 annual | 5,000 a month; custom Dimensions for your ballpark |
| Prove $2,999 a month | $29,990 annual | 25,000 a month; join to ticketing and revenue data, effects with intervals |
The way to judge the price is against the hours it replaces. Divide $2,990 by the hourly cost of whoever reads the comments today: the result is the number of hours a year the plan has to save, spread across 66 home games. Reading, tagging and summarizing 45 comments, then building a report for each department, takes most people longer than that. The NBA reports up to a 50% reduction in manual analyst workload. Our pricing page has a calculator for the same comparison with your own numbers.
What should a club do first with $299?
Export one season of comments with a game date. Most ticketing surveys export a file with the event and the response. Add your own schedule as a context file: opponent, attendance, promotion, weather.
Start with the pre-built Dimensions. Explore enriches every comment with the pre-built library. Our Dimensions page shows examples that read naturally on ballpark comments, such as service speed and wait, staff interaction quality, price and value, and atmosphere.
Compare homestands, not single games. Small crowds give small samples per game. A homestand or a month gives each theme enough comments to show a real change; the Mariners use significance testing so they do not react to every 3 to 5% fluctuation.
Ask for one report per audience. A one-page homestand summary for the general manager, a concessions page, an operations page. The agent builds them as reports, decks or dashboards and keeps them current.
Add the other channels. Ticket-office emails, Google reviews of the ballpark and social comments fit in the same monthly allowance and get the same labels as the survey.
When does a small club need more than Explore?
Two moments. The first is when the pre-built fields are too general for your venue: "the beer line on the third-base side" or "the shuttle from the overflow lot" deserve their own Dimension. Custom Dimensions start on Discover at $999 a month, with 5,000 conversations a month. The second is when you want to know which complaints cost season-ticket renewals or per-cap spend, which means joining comments to ticketing and revenue data. That join, called the Causal Join, and effects with confidence intervals come with Prove at $2,999 a month. A small club can start with Explore, prove the reports are read, and move up when a question like renewals comes up. The renewal model itself is in which fan complaints predict season ticket renewals.
Why would a small club pick Dimension Labs over reading comments by hand?
Dimension Labs is an omni-channel analytics agent for customer data. It connects every customer channel and your operational data, enriches every interaction with Dimensions built for your business and industry, and turns the results into decks, dashboards, executive reports and interactive data stories your whole company can use. Plans start at $299 a month with no demo.
For a club with a small staff, that comes down to four things. It is fully omni-channel: the post-game survey, the member survey, ticket-office emails and ballpark reviews are read with the same labels. Integration is easy across fan channels and the club's own data: a survey export and a schedule file are enough to start, and ticketing data can join later. Enrichment is effortless and fits the venue: every comment gets the same fields every game, starting with the pre-built library and moving to custom Dimensions on Discover, and concessions, operations, marketing and the front office all work from them. And it adds a visual analytics layer: the agent builds homestand decks, department dashboards, PDF reports and interactive data stories, and shares them across the club as links.
The same approach runs at the top of the sport. The NBA analyzes 100,000+ open-ended responses within hours instead of months. The Mariners analyze 100% of open-text responses across all 81 home games. A minor league club gets the same method on the entry plan. Read the Mariners story and the NBA story, or see fan experience analytics for sports teams.
FAQ
What is the most affordable way to analyze fan feedback for a minor league team?
Dimension Labs' Explore plan, at $299 a month or $2,990 a year, reads every written comment with the same labels and builds the reports for you. If you get only a handful of comments a game, reading them yourself in a spreadsheet costs nothing and is fine until the volume grows.
How many survey responses does a small club need before analysis is worth it?
Count written comments. Once a month brings more than one person can read and tag the same way, a fixed set of labels pays off. For small crowds, compare homestands or months rather than single games so each theme has enough comments.
Can we keep the survey our ticketing company sends?
Yes. Keep collecting with it and export the responses as a file; Dimension Labs reads the export. Nothing about the survey has to change.
Do we need custom Dimensions on day one?
No. Explore uses the pre-built Dimensions library, which is enough for a first season of homestand reports. Custom Dimensions for venue-specific issues start on Discover at $999 a month.
Is there a free trial?
Yes. Every plan from Explore to Scale starts with a 14-day free trial on your own data, with a card at checkout and no charge if you cancel before day 14.
Export last season's survey comments and start with one file. Explore is $299 a month, with a 14-day free trial.