About the client

The Canadian Olympic Committee leads the achievement of Team Canada’s podium success and advances Olympic values across Canada. They deliver the latest information on Team Canada rosters, sports and schedules—and share stories to inspire future generations of athletes.

Why the Canadian Olympic Committee hired Zync

During the London 2012 Summer Olympics, olympic.ca wasn’t able to support the Canadian Olympic Committee’s efforts to provide timely event results and a meeting place for fans. The Committee began a search for a new partner to help them revamp their digital assets. We submitted our vision of how the COC could transform and strengthen its online brand presence and we were selected as their new digital agency of record.

How we enhanced the Canadian Olympic Committee online presence for Team Canada

Going into this partnership, we knew that the COC faced significant challenges, primarily high levels of interest for a period of two weeks during Olympic Games, with very low engagement in between. Looking to enhance their digital footprint—and engage fans, corporate partners and sport communities on an owned platform year-round—we focused on their direct and uninterrupted access to Team Canada athletes. This is unique to their organization and a competitive advantage we still focus on today. 

We began with a complete rethink and redesign of their website, focused on evolution, connectivity, engagement and growth of Team Canada’s brand in an ever-changing digital landscape. Our mobile-first solution was to create a modular design system that would allow easy iteration and optimization of olympic.ca without major redesigns and redevelopment in the future.

This was a major undertaking due to the complete reassessment of how fans interact with the website—and the volume of content we had to migrate over. The build was completed in phases with the first iteration ready for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympic Games. Analytics showed visits to the website increased by 5,000% and that success was soon reported in the Globe & Mail. Website traffic and fan engagement has continued to increase over the years, now reaching more than 17 million page views during peak time.

Our next mandate in preparation for the Rio De Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games was to focus on consistent fan engagement, which culminated in the development of the Canadian Olympic Club presented by Bell. It’s a next-generation fan club that brings Team Canada fans closer to the action via athlete-related contests and gamification elements (including quizzes, polls, leaderboards and virtual rewards).

Leading into the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympic Games, we worked with the committee to introduce website personalization, giving fans the ability to select their favourite athletes, sports and games. This resulted in the COC receiving more detailed analytics around specific information fans are looking for, and in-turn allows them to provide them with more meaningful and relevant unique content. With more than 100,000 new fans joining the club during the games, it was a win-win for everyone. We continue to evolve fan engagement to prepare Team Canada for the next olympic games—Tokyo 2020.

We’ve also developed specialized digital assets, including a location-scouting web app with interactive maps, a media guide native app, e-commerce store, online annual reports, a live digital donor wall for the Canadian Olympic Foundation and a resource library called “MyClassroom” for the Canadian Olympic School Program that gives teachers the ability to download and save activities for their curriculum. All of these initiatives have continued our on-going goal of delivering direct access to robust, accurate and official information about Canadian athletes, sports and events in a convenient, reliable and intuitive way.

Final outcome

The realized goals of creating a website that would enhance COC’s fan engagement, building a virtual home for Olympic athletes, allowing flexibility and integrating all digital assets has far surpassed the initial vision. The Canadian Olympic Committee—home of Team Canada—has been able to position itself as “the” place for Canadian Olympic fans, furthering the commitment to develop and support a strong Team Canada and inspire the next generation of athletes.