Case Study: National Hockey League tracks evolving fandom with Posit and Snowflake

National Hockey League tracks fan engagement spikes in real time with Posit and Snowflake

The National Hockey League (NHL) faced a challenge with its fan analytics process, which was clunky and disconnected. The old method involved manually downloading CSVs, running code in a hosted R environment, and uploading outputs to a BI tool, causing data to go stale before it reached stakeholders. The NHL partnered with vendor Posit PBC to streamline this workflow using Posit Workbench.

The solution implemented by Posit was Posit Workbench Advanced, deployed as a Snowflake Native App. This created a single governed workspace where the NHL's data science team could run R and Python code directly against fan data in Snowflake. This streamlined process allowed the team to efficiently analyze data and model spikes in engagement as they happened. While specific metrics were not provided, the NHL gained the infrastructure to track evolving fan trends, such as a recent unexpected wave of engagement from hockey-adjacent fan fiction that sent their numbers "off the charts."

National Hockey League