NEWS & UPDATES

January 27, 2012 In News By Wes Hartline

There is no off-season: Fan Engagement

As a huge sports fan, I have been excited to write this post for some time.

Take a minute and think back to attend­ing your first pro­fes­sional or col­lege game. Although I don’t remem­ber mine, I know my first MLB game came just a week or so after I was born. My fam­ily lived in Atlanta at the time (the Braves were ter­ri­ble in those days) and we had sea­son tickets.

It wasn’t until we moved to Nashville years later that  I remem­ber attend­ing my first live sports event, a col­lege foot­ball game. Although I was only seven years old, I have a dis­tinct mem­ory of my dad tak­ing me to see Army play Van­der­bilt. It was an after­noon game, and the fore­cast was no good. We sat in the bleach­ers for three quar­ters in the pour­ing rain. Then we lis­tened to Van­der­bilt lose the game on the way home in the car. It may not have been the best out­come, but I will always remem­ber that game. It was my first one.

The game-day expe­ri­ences pro­vided for fans have grown immensely over the past twenty years. Con­sider the fan expe­ri­ence today: video, music, lights, activ­i­ties, pre-game, post-game, etc. We have hours of ded­i­cated footage to sport­ing events now. ESPN’s Col­lege Game­day for Foot­ball and Bas­ket­ball are two of the high­est rated tele­vi­sion sports pro­grams in the coun­try. It is esti­mated that rev­enue for all col­le­giate ath­let­ics was $10.6 bil­lion for 2008-09.

So how impor­tant are fans to col­lege sports? Extremely crit­i­cal. You already knew they were impor­tant. Esti­mates show that more than half of the $10.6 bil­lion comes from ticket sales, mer­chan­dis­ing, TV/Radio con­tracts and more.

Engag­ing fans is not only impor­tant; it is nec­es­sary for the con­tin­ued suc­cess of col­le­giate ath­let­ics at the national level as well as for your insti­tu­tion. It is crit­i­cal to keep your fan-base engaged for the long-haul and encour­age new fans to become part of the fam­ily. New fans equal addi­tional rev­enues through ticket sales, mer­chan­dis­ing, etc.

New fans also drive stu­dents to the insti­tu­tion. How many of us dreamt of attend­ing our favorite col­lege while grow­ing up? I even applied to some schools just because of their ath­letic pro­grams. Dri­ving new stu­dents equals future alumni, some­thing I dis­cussed last week.

So how do you engage fans appro­pri­ately? For one, you should ask them. Why do they attend games? What keeps them com­ing back? What about their most beloved ath­letic pro­gram is spe­cial to them? What con­cerns do they have about the activ­i­ties sur­round­ing the program?

You can also be active in com­mu­ni­cat­ing with fans through social media. Whether face­book or twit­ter, com­mit­ted fans engage with their pre­ferred insti­tu­tions and other groups to learn, con­nect with other fans, and stay involved with the lat­est news. Fan appre­ci­a­tion days are also an excel­lent for­mat for engag­ing fans one-on-one.

No mat­ter what  your insti­tu­tion does, there are always more options. The best options are cre­atively devel­oped across pro­grams, depart­ments and other meth­ods. They need to be spread across many media out­lets as well; web­sites, blogs, face­book, twit­ter, youtube, flickr, and other sites will likely engage dif­fer­ent groups and broaden your base of support.

And pos­si­bly the best part? You’ll know when the ideas are work­ing. Fans will arrive ear­lier, stay later, remain engaged, and sup­port the entire insti­tu­tion at a greater level than ever before, and that’s the goal.

Authored By Wes Hartline

Director of Marketing and Video Production