#MyGolfYear (Golf Canada Wrapped)

Since its debut in 2016, the end-of-year Spotify Wrapped campaign has always fascinated me as one of the most brilliant feats of marketing in the modern era: By simply summarizing a customer’s own data and putting an attractive graphics package around it, Spotify earns mounds of free press (Wired, The Verge, Business Insider) and even more reach organically as millions of Spotify users share their listening preferences with their friends on social media.

In my first year with Golf Canada in 2021, having just gotten comfortable with the organization’s incredible dataset on golf being played in Canada, I pitched the obvious: Why don’t we spin up a large number of servers in the cloud, crunch through the data and gift each member of Golf Canada with their own shareable graphic of the golf they played that year? The go-ahead was quickly given and a furious three week effort resulted in the 2021 #MyGolfYear campaign, a simple but well-received surprise to Golf Canada members.

In 2022 and 2023, with more time for planning and exploration, the #MyGolfYear campaign returned, with the basic summary values such as the Total Rounds, # of Holes, Distance Played and Best Round again being featured, and now adding 15 possible ‘achievements’ a golfer could earn due to their play that year.

For technology, #MyGolfYear is powered by Laravel Horizon running on Amazon AWS Cloud as a fast, parallelized queue to process the millions of scores entered annually by hundreds of thousands of Golf Canada’s membership, with MailChimp and Mandrill used for e-mail and OneSignal for push notifications to provide members with their annual stats package.

With an e-mail open rate in excess of 64% and thousands of shareable graphics making the rounds on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, #MyGolfYear had popular success, but added commercial success via sponsorship with JOURNIE Rewards in 2022 and BDO Canada in 2023 and onwards. To me, like Spotify Wrapped, it is the definition of making use of an organization’s existing assets in a new (heavily ‘inspired by’) way to surprise-and-delight one’s own customers while also creating a saleable new asset.

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