When you think of sports and data, you may think about all the data collect on player performance and game stats. There's another world of sports data that is usually overlooked: the fans. In this episode, I speak with Caiti Donovan, the VP of Data & Insights at Sports Innovation Lab, a sports market research firm. Caiti started her career in marketing and business development at Viacom and Spotify where she used data storytelling to work with advertisers and partners. More recently she learned how build the data systems she was once only a consumer of. We'll discuss how she made the transition to data, getting a data science certification at The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University, and current projects she's working on at Sports Innovation Lab.

Working with data at ViacomCBS and Spotify

Caiti spent 15 years in marketing and sales roles where data was a core part of her day-to-day projects. She used a lot of proprietary data systems and even helped build some of these systems. Using the data available to her, she'd take different datasets and turn the data into a format useful for data storytelling. These stories would be used for partnership development or working with advertisers. Data storytelling is a common theme on this podcast. See episode 62 with Janie Ho, episode 56 with John Napolean-Kuofie, and episode 35 on the Shape of Dreams.

At ViacomCBS, Caiti would look at the data behind shows like Jersey Shore and SpongeBob to see what type of revenue opportunities her team could create based on the audience of these shows. The data could also be analyzed to help inform content development for these shows. The goal was to understand their younger fans and figure out what it meant to have conversations with the fans of these shows.

After a stint working with a few startups in a consulting capacity, Caiti eventually landed at Spotify. At the time, Spotify had a hard time turning all the data they were sitting on into narratives in a B2B and B2C context. She worked with clients like the NBA, Ford, and Nike. In terms of the data stories she was saying to her clients from a B2B perspective, she also had to make sure it carried over to the B2C side (Spotify subscribers).

From there, Caiti made a big hump from entertainment to sports. She realized her "purpose meets passion" moment is finding ways to use data to have impact on the world. She wanted to tackle challenges faced by women in sports and also find a way to better connect with the fans of women's sports. Caiti eventually co-founded the non-profit SheIS Sport to bring together every single professional women's sports league. Through this experience, Caiti learned a lot about the biases and inequities in data in the sports world. She realized she needed more technical expertise to have a direct impact on how data is collected and analyzed in this world, and went back to school for data science (more on this later).