
Motasem (Mota) Elbawab | CX Leader Spotlight
Having fallen in love with sports through Basketball at the age of 6, Mota has traveled the world pursuing his passions in both professional sports and digital. Mota spent 3 years delivering next-generation digital experiences for FIBA (Basketball International Federation) and other sporting organizations.
Today, Mota heads up digital at the FIVB. Mota has been leading digital strategy and transformation with a digital unit composed of 3 sub-teams: Product (fan-facing channels), Content (social media, online) and Technology (data, aggregation, and CRM).
What is the FIVB?
The International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) is the world governing body responsible for all forms of volleyball and providing leadership to its members and to millions of athletes worldwide. They are one of the biggest International federations in terms of members.
Their main events are the Volleyball Nations League (every year) and the Volleyball World Championships (every 4 years). According to Neilson’s research, there are around 500 million Volleyball fans around the world. Volleyball is international and was one of the most viewed sports during the Olympics in RIO 2016.
FIVB’s Digital goals for 2020



Digital is not just social media or about technology. It touches every part of our business today. We need to connect with fans everywhere and on every channel. The current situation gives us a year to reflect, prepare and deliver more cool stuff for the fans.
Motasem Elbawab, Head of Digital at FIVB
The FIVB has a clear goal to understand their fans better and communicate with them on a more personal level. To achieve this, the high-level goals for this year are increasing the audiences on digital platforms and increasing the identifiable fan base.
What been impact of the recent events on the FIVB?
FIVB’s primary concern is always the health and safety of fans and players. We have reviewed our calendar and postponed some of our events in light of the recent events. The challenges before traditional sports entities goes far beyond sports, which have largely come to a standstill.
However, while there are no games being played, the sports tech industry remains plugged in, continuing to innovate and trying to solve new problems as athletes are sidelined and stadiums sit empty in the midst of a pandemic.
What advice would you have for traditional businesses?
Review your structure, your process, and your platforms. Figure out what you can digitize. How can you be more efficient, share knowledge and move faster? Digitization breaks silos within organizations and builds better businesses and better experiences.
To cope with the changes, we hire people who are passionate about volleyball and people who are experts in their field. Build small focused teams that deliver incremental results quickly.
Now is the time to re-think and adapt.
We are working on something special ❤️🏐🚀



Love Volleyball?
We have been using the downtime to build something new and exciting.
Give us a shout if you love volleyball and want to join the beta group!
Email: [email protected]
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