LAVA signs the Toledo Mud Hens and West Michigan Whitecaps

LAVA is heading to the ballpark! We're proud to announce two new Minor League Baseball partnerships: the Toledo Mud Hens and the West Michigan Whitecaps.

Both are Detroit Tigers affiliates—the Mud Hens at Triple-A and the Whitecaps at High-A—and both are the kind of organizations we love working with: community-driven, fan-obsessed, and always looking for ways to make the gameday experience better.

About the Toledo Mud Hens

The Toledo Mud Hens are one of the most iconic brands in Minor League Baseball. A Triple-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, the Mud Hens play at Fifth Third Field in downtown Toledo, Ohio—a venue that was named the best minor league ballpark in America by Newsweek when it opened in 2002. With a history dating back to 1896 and 75 home games per season, the Mud Hens have built a loyal, multigenerational fan base in northwest Ohio.

Modernizing the fan experience in Toledo

The Mud Hens came to LAVA looking to modernize a fan experience that was held back by disconnected systems and manual processes, including paper vouchers for rewards and an inability to redeem across all points of sale. LAVA is replacing that approach with a connected digital ecosystem, integrating across the Mud Hens' ticketing with Tickets.com, POS, and payment systems to power mobile wallet passes,  points and stored value rewards, digital redemption across concessions and merchandise, and added-value ticket offers—all in one platform. The result: a seamless, modern fan experience bridging digital and in-person touchpoints.

“Delivering a great gameday experience has always been at the core of what we do, and partnering with LAVA will enable us to keep raising that bar. Moving from paper vouchers to a fully connected digital platform means our fans can focus on what they came for—a great night at the ballpark." — Brian Perkins, VP of Fan & Business Intelligence, Toledo Mud Hens

About the West Michigan Whitecaps

The West Michigan Whitecaps are the High-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, based at LMCU Ballpark in Comstock Park, Michigan, just outside Grand Rapids. The Whitecaps were named Minor League Baseball's 2025 Organization of the Year—the highest organizational honor in MiLB—capping a season in which they posted a 92–39 record, won the Midwest League championship, and achieved their highest average attendance in 25 years. It was their fourth consecutive season of attendance growth, a testament to their passionate fan base and relentless commitment to the fan experience.

Getting started in West Michigan

The Whitecaps are kicking off their partnership with LAVA this season by launching concession added-value tickets, giving fans preloaded concession value tied directly to their ticket purchase through an integration with Tickets.com. It's a great first step that enhances the gameday experience from the moment a ticket is bought.

Why Minor League Baseball 

Minor league teams are the heart of their communities. With 70+ home games per season, they offer a massive number of fan touchpoints—and every one of those interactions is an opportunity to deepen the fan relationship, drive per cap spend, and create moments that bring people back. These organizations run lean and move fast, which makes LAVA's pre-built integrations and fast time to value especially relevant. Signing two Tigers affiliates also signals LAVA's ability to serve across organizational ecosystems, from Triple-A to High-A.

"The best fan experiences start with connected data and real-time activation. We're excited to partner with the Mud Hens and Whitecaps and help them deliver exactly that." — Wen Miao, CEO, Lava.ai

What's next

Two new partnerships, two great teams, and a lot of baseball ahead. We're just getting started with both the Mud Hens and the Whitecaps, and we're looking forward to building on these foundations—more integrations, more fan moments, and more ways to drive value across the gameday experience.

Interested in how LAVA can help your organization? Contact us.

More flexibility, more ways to belong: 3 ways to use LAVA’s Programs features

Your member base isn't one audience. LAVA Programs let you create member statuses within that base—a kids club, a summer promotion, a sponsor-backed temporary benefit—each with its own perks and its own start and end dates.

A program grants a defined set of benefits to any member who joins it. Members can belong to as many as you offer, so one person might hold a season-long membership, a family club, and a limited-run promotion at the same time. Each program carries its own badge and set of rewards in the member portal, so members come to associate the program with the brand logo or image as well as the value it brings.

Here are three ways to use them.

1. A seasonal club for members and their families

A kids club is a familiar example. Joining grants a set of one-time welcome rewards, alongside persistent benefits that last the length of the membership, whether it’s seasonal or annual.

The same program can be joined more than once, so a family with three kids signs each one up individually, with each child’s details attached to the membership. Each membership is tracked separately, so if one ends, it doesn't affect the others.

The join window and the active window are also set independently, so memberships can go on sale months before the program begins, giving you time to promote and drive enrollment before it starts. 

Programs can be purchased or free to join, so this works whether the club is a revenue line or a perk of an existing membership.

2. Badges and rewards earned through a challenge

Some programs are earned instead of bought. Completing a challenge or game can grant a member status, along with special rewards and a digital badge that marks the achievement. 

Say an organization runs a program for members who attend three games in a month. Members who hit the mark are automatically added to the program, receive its rewards, and have the badge added to their member profile and account page. 

This works well on an ongoing program rather than a fixed-season one, since members join as they qualify instead of all starting on the same date.

3. A partner or sponsor-branded program

A program can also be built around a partner campaign. Imagine a beverage brand backing a summer program: the badge carries the partner's branding, and the rewards granted on joining are the partner's offers rather than your own, redeemable at your own points of sale like any other reward, or offsite at a partner location.

Sign-up can live wherever the campaign does. A QR code on packaging, on a partner's signage, or on a display onsite leads to a co-branded registration form, so members join from wherever they encounter it.

And because joining and redeeming are both tracked, you can easily track and report the results, including how many members joined and how many redeemed.

Getting started with LAVA Programs

Every organization runs its membership differently, and programs are built to fit around a variety of different needs. Kids clubs, sponsor campaigns, earned or purchased tiers, seasonal promotions—each of these can run with its own rewards, timeline, and badge alongside whatever base loyalty program you already have in place.

If there's a program you've been wanting to run, we can help you figure out how to build it. Want to learn what’s possible for your brand? Sign up for a demo here.

The customer engagement gap: why waiting to act is costing you

There's a moment, usually quiet and easy to miss, when a loyal customer starts to pull away. They skip an event. They stop redeeming offers. They browse but don't buy. And by the time most brands notice, the window to bring them back has already closed. 

The customer engagement gap is the delay between when a customer starts to disengage and when a brand finds out. And for brands that rely on high-value, recurring relationships (read: season ticket holders, loyalty members, repeat buyers), that gap is one of the most expensive problems you're not measuring.

What is the customer engagement gap?

The old model wasn't built for this

For years, customer engagement has operated on a delay. Data gets collected, reports get run, campaigns get scheduled—and somewhere in that process, the signal that mattered most gets lost in the lag. In fact, according to the SAP Engagement Index 2026, 54% of enterprises can't access and use real-time data—meaning brands are acting on stale insights and arrive too late to the moments that actually drive engagement.

But we're now in an era where consumers can compare, decide, or switch brands at a moment's notice, and brand loyalty is more fragile than ever. When batch-and-blast campaigns go out without acknowledging that the customer hasn't attended an event in three months or redeemed a single offer all year, the result isn't just inefficiency—it's missed moments. It's no surprise, then, that 58% of consumers say most marketing emails they receive aren't relevant to them, the same SAP study reports. That's not a content problem, it's a data activation problem. And in customer relationships, missed moments are missed revenue.

Why it matters: the cost of the engagement gap

The engagement gap has a price tag, and it's higher than brands realize.

Churn is the obvious one. Losing a season ticket member, a loyalty program anchor, or a high-LTV retail customer doesn't just mean lost revenue this cycle, it means lost compounding value across every renewal, upsell, and referral that would have followed.

But there's a subtler cost too: the erosion of trust that happens when customers feel unseen. When a brand reaches out with a generic offer to someone who just had a frustrating experience, or sends a renewal notice to a member who hasn't engaged in months without acknowledging the drift—it signals that the brand isn't paying attention. And customers notice. In fact, 48% of consumers care less about the brand and more about the overall experience (SAP Engagement Index 2026).

The brands winning at retention aren't just spending more on outreach. They're spending smarter, by acting on the right signals at the exact moments of greatest potential impact.

What does real-time customer engagement look like in practice?

Real-time customer engagement isn't about sending more messages faster. It's about connecting the signals customers are already sending—behavioral, transactional, contextual—and acting on them in the moment while they still mean something.

In practice, that looks like this:

• Cruise line: Passenger flow and restaurant occupancy are tracked in real time, so diners get directed to venues with open seating and traffic spreads across restaurants throughout the day.

• Retail: A loyal customer’s spend drops below their usual threshold mid-year. Instead of a generic message, they receive a personalized offer for a surprise gift they can redeem in-store with any purchase.

• Sports (ticket scan): An fan who typically shows up late to games gets a message about a special concessions discount if they arrive early. The moment they scan their ticket, they get a push notification with a personalized welcome message and their discount offer.

• Sports (live game action): A fan’s favorite player scores a buzzer-beating three-pointer in the second quarter. The fan immediately receives a special merchandise discount offer to celebrate with a new jersey. 

Each of these scenarios has one thing in common: the action was triggered by the customer's behavior or real-time events, not a calendar. The result: higher relevance, better conversion, and deeper loyalty.

The infrastructure behind real-time customer engagement

Closing the customer engagement gap takes more than speed—it takes unified data. Behavioral signals, transaction history, digital engagement, and contextual inputs need to work together to surface a complete picture of where each customer stands.

This is where real-time triggers and insights change the equation. Instead of reacting after the fact based on static reports, you can surface the next best action before the moment passes.

But infrastructure alone isn't enough. The real shift happens when the teams closest to your customers—service, loyalty, marketing, retention—are empowered to act on those signals in the moment. Intelligence that lives in a dashboard no one checks isn't intelligence at all. 

Are you ready to close the gap?

Attention spans are short, and competition is high. The question isn't whether your customers are sending signals. They are. The question is whether you're set up to hear them in time. Request a demo to learn how LAVA can help.