Sunday night saw the most interactive and widely broadcast Football League Awards ceremony in its history.  Taking place at The Brewery in London it not only hosted 600 guests from clubs, sponsors and the football industry but was broadcast on YouTube and Facebook as well.

The streaming of the awards was primarily on the Football League’s YouTube and Facebook pages but was also syndicated out to club websites and YouTube channels.  The main awards were for the players with Danny Ings picking up the Sky Bet Championship Player of the Year.

On top of that they employed ScribbleLive, who are a partner of the Football League now, to run a live blog throughout the evening.  Running this alongside the livestream gave fans more of a reason to watch the awards of the FL website, something they’re keen to increase.

Results of the livestream are pretty impressive. The Football League has revealed to us that it received 59,860 unique visitors to the live blogging page. Those people spent on average 8min 36 secs on the page.

From the point of view of this site the main interest revolved around the “Perform Best Digital Content and Audience Growth Award”.  There were 5 teams nominated for this category; AFC Bournemouth, Coventry City, Derby County, Oxford United and Queens Park Rangers.

The category was assessed by a team of judges and was based on which club could best demonstrate results that they achieved during 2013 in developing content to grow audience to their websites and channels.

The team that came out on top was Derby County for their ‘Return of the Mac’ campaign, which was delivered across a number of mediums.  The campaign centered around the return of manager Steve McClaren to the club, he was assistant manager from 1995-99, in September 2013.

The strategy was designed to encourage fans to back the new management after the sacking of popular manager Nigel Clough.  The result of their efforts led to an increase in the number of unique visitors per month to over 200,000 and improved social conversion rates to nearly 25%.

On winning the award, the club’s Multi-Media Editor Matt Reeder said;

We saw the opportunity with Steve’s appointment to re-engage with the fans and built the ‘Return of the Mac’ strapline which came from Faye Nixon in our marketing department.  We worked on the whole concept and also looked at how we could re-engage with our fans across all platforms – RamsPlayer, the website, Twitter, YouTube.

Before ‘Return of the Mac’ we looked at how we could drive that exclusivity we could offer with the new manager and took ownership of that which meant we were the first place fans came to.”

Well done to Derby County and their digital comms team.  We’re hoping to speak with the club in more detail within the next days and have a new article up about the club and their digital plans.

You can watch the whole 1hr 40min+ video below of the ceremony with every award covered.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSebtrOHls8&feature=share[/youtube]