Your LAVA season prep checklist

The start of a new season is the best time to make sure your member program is working as hard as it can. Our NFL clients are deep in preseason prep right now, so we've pulled together the checklist we run with them.

No matter which league you’re gearing up for—NFL, NBA, NHL, or another season entirely—this checklist is worth revisiting to keep your program driving engagement, brand loyalty, and revenue. 

Here's what we cover to prep for a new season:

1. Set your goals for the season

Start here: what do you want to accomplish? A few common goals we see:

• Grow your member base: turn more unknown customers into known, engaged members

• Create reasons for guests to stay and spend: Try more early-arrival and timed Moments

• Add more partner-sponsored Moments: prove ROI for sponsors and create new partnership opportunities

You don't need a formal plan. Even one new use case is progress, and your Customer Success Manager (CSM) can help you map goals to what's realistic this season.

2. Refresh your passes

With your goals in mind, your passes are the next thing to review. We start by refreshing what's already there — updating rewards, expiration dates, and designs for the new season.

This is also a natural moment to look for expansion opportunities. Most clients start with a pass or two, then add more season over season as they get more out of the platform. An employee pass or a new tier for Season Ticket Members are common next steps. If your program is growing, this is where that growth takes shape.

3. Plan your Moments

Our team loves helping you find new and creative ways to engage your fans, especially when they’re personalized for your team. Here are a few of the most popular Moment triggers:

• Ticket scans: send timely and targeted offers to members the moment they scan in. Incentivize early arrival to maximize spend and time on site.

• Purchases: follow a transaction with a reward, an offer, or a thank you.

• Live NFL/NBA game feed: one of our favorite features, and one worth turning on if you haven't. It lets you trigger Moments off live game events, like a themed reward when a player scores, an opponent fumbles, or your team hits a certain point threshold. 

These are the ones we see most, but they're a starting point, not a limit. Bring your goals to your CSM, and we'll help you build the Moments that fit them.

4. Map your Season Ticket Member price codes and default rewards

If Season Ticket Members get special benefits, make sure that logic is up to date for the new season, whether it's automated through ticketing or updated manually. Double-check that your default rewards reflect the new season.

5. Review and test your new activation configurations

Once we’ve planned your new Moments, our team can help you configure, review, and test them before they go live.

6. Take care of LAVA admin housekeeping

A quick pass through the essentials keeps everything running clean:

• User management: add or remove users in case of any staffing changes

• Reward management: create new and retire old rewards

• Service comp budgets: set and assign budgets for your staff

  
  

7. Handle any team-specific readiness items

Every team has a few of its own team-specific elements based on how your program is set up, such as a cash back program for your members or registration pages for sponsor campaigns and special events. Your CSM knows yours—flag anything unique to your program that we can help with. 

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Ready to run through it? Connect with our team to knock out your readiness items. Not sure who to contact? Reach out to customersuccess@lava.ai. And if there's one goal we'd point everyone toward this season, it's a simple one: get more out of LAVA.

Introducing Member Portal: a new home for member benefits

Member Portal is where your members come to access everything their membership unlocks—their profile, their pass, announcements, rewards marketplace, special events, and games. One destination for your membership program.

Why we built it

Member Portal brings the member experience into one unified hub. This marks a deliberate shift for LAVA. The platform has always been strong on the operational side of membership—venue workflows, reward fulfillment, the parts your members never see. Member Portal is the new customer-facing layer of the platform, expanding member passes into a space to access benefits, set preferences, and more.

For members, it's a destination where they engage with the program, redeem rewards, and feel the value of belonging. For brands, it's a measurable, branded surface that drives engagement, opens new revenue streams, and creates sponsorship opportunities.

What's inside Member Portal

Member Portal brings your brand’s membership experience into one convenient place on their mobile app (via LAVA SDK) or desktop browser:

• Member profile & pass: Provide a single place for members to view their membership options and tiers, benefits, and digital pass.

• Marketplace: Let members spend points or branded currency on curated rewards, sponsor offers, merch, and access to exclusive events.

• Games, challenges, auctions & lucky draws: Drive engagement and new revenue with challenges, enter to win games, trivia and auctions.

• Announcements: Push timely, targeted updates to members about upcoming news and events

• Events: Manage RSVPs and member-only access without the complexity or cost of ticketing

What this unlocks for your team

Beyond the cost savings of consolidating vendors, Member Portal gives your team something most loyalty stacks can't: a brandable, sponsor-ready surface that sits between your brand and your fans.

• Brand it your way. Member Portal is built to match your look and feel. Tailor the experience for each tier or group.

• Measure what matters. See which experiences pull members in and which keep them coming back.

• Drive new revenue. Create new revenue streams with Marketplace, auctions, and co-branded sponsor offers.

Member Portal is available now with two options: embed it in-app with LAVA's mobile SDK or run it as a standalone responsive web experience for desktop and mobile.

More to come in Q3

Member Portal is available today, and the roadmap is already in the works. Coming later this year:

• Card on file. Members securely store a payment method for faster checkout. This also unlocks payment via facial recognition through Wicket. 

• Credit card payments in Marketplace. Members pay directly for rewards, merch, and event access, not just with points or branded currency.

Ready to create your Member Portal?

For more information about Member Portal, request a demo from one of our LAVA platform experts. 

Introducing Customer Manager: know your members better, resolve issues faster

Today's brands are capturing customer data across dozens of touchpoints—in-person purchases, digital engagement, ticket scans, reward redemptions, and more. But having the data isn't the problem. The problem is making sense of it all in one place, quickly enough to actually act on it when a customer needs help.

Customer Manager is LAVA's answer to that challenge: a centralized member management tool that brings together a complete view of your customers and gives your team the tools to act on it, right from within the platform.

Everything you need to know about a member in one place

Customer Manager brings together the full picture of every member into a single unified profile. You can look up any member by name, email, phone number, or ticketing ID and immediately access:

• Profile details and preferences

• Reward and offer history

• Transaction and reward redemption history

• Points and stored value balances

• Member tier (if applicable)

• AI-powered insights (currently available for NBA, NFL, and NHL clients)

No more toggling between systems. No more waiting on someone else to pull the data you need.

See it. Fix it. Move on.

Customer Manager isn't just a read-only dashboard—it adds real operational capabilities so your team can act instantly. Directly from a member's profile, you can:

• Resend a lost wallet pass so a fan isn't stuck waiting

• Grant an ad hoc reward to quickly restore customer satisfaction

• Adjust or transfer balances between accounts

• Review transactions to assess disputes or queries

• Confirm reward balances in real time

• Update profile details, including tier and preferences

AI-powered renewal insights that go beyond the score

For NBA, NFL, and NHL clients, Customer Manager also surfaces LAVA's Season Ticket Member Renewal Probability Score, an AI-powered model that predicts which season ticket holders are at risk of not renewing.

What makes it different? LAVA's model doesn't just look at ticketing data. It layers in point-of-sale behavior, reward redemptions, game-day arrival patterns, resale activity, and digital engagement to build a far richer picture. The result is a model that delivers the most accurate and actionable prediction, validated against multiple years of ticket purchase data and renewals. The model has a 0.91 ROC score, significantly above the industry average of 0.7–0.8.

With these insights, your team can identify at-risk members early, understand why they're at risk (not just that they are), segment by renewal probability, and trigger targeted retention actions before the renewal window even opens.

The bottom line

When your team can see the full picture and act on it immediately, every member interaction becomes a better experience. Get complete visibility, real-time action, and AI-powered insights—all in one place.

Ready to see Customer Manager in action? Request a demo to see how your team can resolve issues faster and retain more members.

If you're an existing LAVA customer, your system admin can grant Customer Manager access through User Management settings.