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COSIDA CONFERENCE CALL

January 28, 2016

JEFF SCHWARTZ: Good afternoon and welcome to the sixth installment of the 2015-2016 CoSIDA Continuing Education Series sponsored by Capital One.

My name is Jeff Schwartz. I'm the Senior Associate Athletic -- Director of Athletic Communications at North Dakota State University and co-chair of the CoSIDA Continuing Education Committee, and I'll be moderating today's call as we discuss budget proposal best practices.

Presenting on today's call are Notre Dame Senior Associate Athletics Director, John Heisler. Adam Ledyard, the Sports Information Director at East Texas Baptist. And Drew University Director of Athletics and a former SID, Jason Fein.

Later this afternoon we'll have the full audio of today's call as well as a transcript on the Cover It Live blog, a FastScript from CoSIDA's official transcript provider ASAP Sports available for online demand use at CoSIDA.com.

Listeners on today's call can follow along on the Cover It Live blog and ask questions. We'll address as many questions as we can during this call.

During today's call, John will talk about how he's seen our jobs transition from traditional media relations to more self-produced content, particularly as it pertains to Web and social media communications; how that has presented additional needs for resources and how he's gone about making a case to address those needs. Adam will discuss the importance of having detailed analytics that accompany your proposals for additional resources. He also will cover the corporate sponsorship model he developed at East Texas Baptist to supplement funding.

Jason will focus on creative problem solving when it comes to budget issues and how he and his staff go about finding ways to help themselves.

With that, we'll turn it over to John to discuss our first topic.

JOHN HEISLER: Jeff, thanks very much. I was struck yesterday as I was finalizing what I was going to say today by a story in the Chicago Tribune. There was a rather visible City of Chicago bribery scandal and trial that finished up this week.

And the story in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, and it's worth noting that this whole situation came about because of some investigative reporting by the Tribune -- there was one juror that agreed to be interviewed.

And at the very end of the story he was asked what this meant from a big picture standpoint. And his comment was "Nationally we see a lot of the corruption exposed by reporters and in this case it was the Chicago Tribune, and at the same time you see all these cuts at newspapers and you wonder, after they're all gone, who will be left to look for it?" That was the end of the quote.

And certainly the corruption aspect of it isn't a valid comparison, but I think all of us are dealing with the media aspect of it relative to what's happened to the newspapers. It's affected all of us, and I think as we all look at our own content and what we're competing against, that kind of sets a tone for where we're headed.

I think you have to start with the reality that no matter how large or small our school or staff, our budget are, we're never going to think that it's enough. Another part of that reality is that media relations is seldom looked at as a profit center, other than maybe a few exceptions.

And it's unlikely that the day is going to come that every single college athletic department doesn't have additional revenue production as a priority.

So what that means in our world is that we all have to be more strategic than ever for a variety of reasons. Old school sports information items like media guides and game notes seem to mean next to nothing to many of today's coaches and quite often to our potential student-athletes.

Coaches are way more invested in representing their programs via social media and video. And you see many FBS football programs that have an entire staff strictly dedicated to social media creation.

And so that's prompted many of us to attempt to transform our websites into something more than a repository for media guide materials, stats, game notes and game stories.

And that's where the Chicago Tribune comment comes in. The reality is that more and more athletic directors every day are not going to wait for the mainstreet tribune to come and cover every soccer or softball game, because that's simply unrealistic. It's just not going to happen.

There may be more media than ever, and there may be websites than ever, but more and more athletic directors are taking the position that we are going to tell our own story; we are going to use our access and we are going to be a content provider and to some degree we may go head to head with the media who cover us every day.

Now, that can make for some thorny relationships with those media entities and potentially some conflicts relative to access. But the bottom line is that we're all now in the business of making tough decisions, day to day, week to week and month to month, on allocating financial resources to that content creation.

Some of us merging areas such as digital media and traditional sports information into one comprehensive communications entity. But we are still having to make those tough calls on priorities between social media, video, print and everything in between.

The other aspect of the challenge is that we're appealing to constituents that range from maybe 10 years old to maybe 90 and how those different age groups consume content is nowhere near the same.

So the reality is you can have a can't-miss story idea and yet you can spend an hour debating whether you were better off presenting it as a long- or short-form video piece, a long- or short-form print piece, a photo and cutline on Twitter or Instagram or some combination of all of those, and maybe there's not a necessarily a wrong answer.

So what's the future of print for a younger generation that couldn't care less if there's a newspaper in the driveway every morning? And how many of us have enough people in our department or our office who can create a compelling feature piece that would even think to rival something that a Dana O'Neil or Pat Forde might publish online?

The reality, once again, is that you're going to be challenged more than ever to make those content decisions, and you are never going to have as many people as you want to write, to edit or to create at a high level. And you may well be looking at freelancers or third-parties or even other campus resources to help you create and distribute your content.

It isn't going to become easier. It isn't going to become cheaper. At the end of the day, it's going to require more of your planning and strategy and brainpower to figure out how to make your dollars work for you.

And then comes the whole cold, hard truth about the entire communications business that a year from now we're all going to be talking about devoting our resources to things that don't even exist today because they haven't even been invented.

Anyway, that's all I have. So thank you very much.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: Thanks, John.

We will now transition to Adam.

ADAM LEDYARD: Hello. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I added some more budgets, increased my budget here at a small school, Division III school. We have about 1100 schools here in Marshall, Texas, and a little over between three and 400 student-athletes.

I'm in my fourth year here at ETBU, and when I came here there wasn't much of a budget in my area because they transitioned my position here when I came from public relations to athletics and there really wasn't a budget.

So we've built it up over the year, over the last three years, but I've needed more income for things I've wanted to do. So there's a couple of things that I've done here to increase my budget within and through sponsorships.

But I want to go back to what John said where I agree with the social media. I'm going to talk a little bit about social media analytics and why you need to know those and where you're going with it and the reach of it, because in the long run that will help you, and agree with him that you need to know your story, your branding, where you want to go with it, because you'll use that across the board in everything that you do in athletics.

So when I got here three years ago, they didn't have much of a social media presence. And I saw there was a lot of people that liked social media and was investing in our one main Twitter account.

And I wanted to mirror what Division I schools had done with theirs, with individual Twitter accounts, which wasn't seen much at a Division II or Division III level. So I started that. And in the last three years we've gained numerous followers on all of our individual accounts.

On the Division III social media board we're ranked fifth out 440 schools. So what I've done to help increase my budget here is last year our men's basketball team went on a run at the end of the season to win the conference tournament, and then we made it to Elite Eight for Division III, eventually falling to the national champion.

And after the season was done, I went back, looked at all the analytics through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I sat down, took about two hours to do that, looked at all my retweets, all the tweets that were large retweets, all the shares that were large shares on Facebook.

All the photos on Instagram I put up with videos and looked at how many were liked overall, shared overall and retweeted. I put down those numbers on a piece of paper. And then I went to my athletic director and said: I would like to have more money for social media on game day to have a student do strictly social media here at ETBU on game days for every sport across the board.

And he said, well, he goes we can present it and see what will happen. Because he was buying into what I was doing and seeing it because social media is free. Everything you put out there is free. It doesn't cost you to have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, unless you're boosting things on Facebook.

But overall the product you put up there is free. So it's a free avenue to advertise your sport or your brand to your fans out there, to your recruits, to the potential recruits and what you're doing.

So I sat down with him, showed him our numbers. And he was impressed with them and sent them on to our interim president at the time.

And at budget time it came back and they said we're going to invest in what you want to do. Here's an extra -- I think I asked for an extra $5,000 for student workers this year. They go: Here you go. You can now have a social media person. At every home game, hire a student to do it.

And at our level at Division III that's unheard of. There's nobody at our level having students doing social media in a game like we do. And this year I was also blessed where I got an extra graduate assistant on top of that, just through the things through what I've shown what I'm doing with corporate sponsors and social media.

And now I have actually most games two social media people at our home games, one doing some in-game stuff, another person doing some video and pictures on the side in-game.

But, for instance, if you know that your team is going to make a run in the postseason or getting well or has done well in season, look at your analytics. Go into Facebook. Check the back end of it, there's an analytics site there. See what your reach is. You can see what your reach is as you scroll down your pages. For instance, it will show reach 5,600, total views of videos, shares, record that stuff. Then you can go into the back end of it and see exactly the total reach of it. Record those numbers.

On Twitter nowadays you can just click on the little bars at the bottom and it will show you what your reach is right then. Record that stuff. And even on Instagram there's an app you can download to put in your Instagram information and see how many times a picture has been re-Instagrammed on there and what that reach is. So there's ways to record your reach for those avenues.

And once you take those avenues, if it's something that you want to invest in and really want to do, then you can sit down with your athletic director and say this is what I would like to do, send it forward, and hopefully they'll see what your vision and your future is, buy into it, and give you some more money.

The second item that has really helped me here at ETBU when I came is, three years ago, I'm now in my fourth year, three years ago, they did not have a corporate sponsorship program for athletics.

And I went to a conference in Dallas and they showed some things for sponsorships. And I took some ideas from there, came back, asked my athletic director, going into my second year: Is it all right if I try and raise some money for my budget here to do some things, to have live stats and live video and different things like that that weren't in my budget going into my second year because it wasn't budgeted in there with the new area that I was in.

They said: Sure, try and raise some money. I didn't think he knew how much or how big it would get. And through the things that I've done, the first year, I went out and raised $11,000. The second year it jumped to 18,000. And this year it was $20,000. And what I did is I took our marquee sport here in East Texas, which is football, where we get a lot of our income for sporting events when we average about 2500 people coming to our games, and I made up a corporate sponsorship packet geared for football with all the other sports involved with it the rest of the year.

My packets range from $500 up to $2500, depending on what you would like to get. And then we have what I call kind of an ala cart menu on the side where you can do just radio commercials for football, radio commercials for basketball.

We do radio for football and basketball home games and football on the road and home. And so we have that in there. We have a coach's show that we sell sponsorships for, try to sell sponsorships for.

We have what we call Neptune Radio, gametime radio, that we play before the games at all of our sporting events that advertisers can buy 30 seconds on. It will play before the games. And we use that, we're in the third year of using that.

And it's a good marketing and branding tool. And all that is put into our corporate sponsorship packet. This year I grew it to adding a sports fan engagement app, our athletic app through SuperFanU, and all that's being paid for by these corporate sponsorships, money that's being raised.

And so with these sponsorships, then I can then go and use this money to pay for the extra things that I like to do here for branding and marketing through our SportsFan engagement app. We have an athletic virtual tool for all our facilities on our website. An athletic Web browser download. We do a fan vote every week through a brand, Thunder, a company that we work with. Then we also, of course, pay for the live video that we signed up this year for.

And it allows me then to do traveling extensively with students for football season when we go on the road. I can take two or three students on the road, have them go overnight with us to do social media and video clips and things on the road then.

And so through this then with the corporate sponsorships, this is what the money has allowed me to do. So those are two different avenues that I've used to promote more money within my own athletic budget through, one, raising money through corporate sponsorships, and then showing social media reach and trying to gain more money through that through my athletic director and then the president.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: Adam, I do have a question. This is Jeff, your moderator. What is the app you were talking about to download to see Instagram analytics?

ADAM LEDYARD: It is -- hold on. Here, let me see if I can find it on my phone.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: And a reminder to those on the call today, remember to post your questions to Cover It Live blog. There's a link right at the top. You can send questions or comments.

ADAM LEDYARD: I only use it about once a month. And I'm trying to see where I put that on my phone. I cannot remember, because I don't use it very often. It's Re-Post or Re -- I'm not sure. I don't remember the name of it.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: If you find it, send it to Barb and she'll get that on the website. Okay. Remember to post your questions on Cover It Live blog.

We'll close out today's call with Jason Fein.

JASON FEIN: Adam, I think, touched on some points as far as creative problem solving that I'll touch on as well in a more general sense.

I think that we can all agree, as John mentioned in his presentation, that we're all working with tight budgets. Probably, no matter how much we have, it's never enough.

So what we try and do here is try and get creative with our solutions. We meet as a staff pretty often to discuss budget planning. And what I tell my staff, in many situations, is please bring me your problems but also try and bring me some solutions and suggestions.

And I think Adam had some real good specific ways of going about that. When we look at our budget process here, and we can start with the premise that we definitely don't have enough, like most small institutions, we look to try and, number one, make sure that what we're asking for is realistic. Number two that we can be as itemized and specific as possible in what we're asking for and that we can back that up with solid information when a coach comes to me and I ask questions or when I go to our bosses and ask questions.

And also that while we want it to be specific we also want it to be flexible enough so that halfway throughout the year you don't have to come back and necessarily ask for more. Can we make that budget flexible enough so that certain things can fit into certain other areas.

So I think John mentioned the difference now between media guides and printed game notes and now moving to social media and video. So in your categories that you're coming up with, trying to keep them flexible so that you may be able to cover whatever you as the department head is trying to accomplish.

And I think that that's probably the first step in planning our budgets is understanding your goal and what is it that you're trying to accomplish. And your budget is not there to track every dime in and out, and your boss really probably doesn't care about tracking every dime in and out. It's more about are we in our day-to-day activities helping work towards that overall goal that we're trying to create.

So once you have that overall goal, I think certainly, and Adam definitely did this with his idea on the social media person, you want to do your homework. You want to look at, in this case, the analytics. So when he went into his boss, he had researched and gathered info and whatever questions came up he had the answer to.

And as a department head dealing with 19 different coaches, an equipment manager, athletic trainer and sports information director, you love it when you have the answers and don't have to go back and get them and schedule new meetings and try and do that, fill in those blanks for your staff.

I think the next step is to work together, not only with your staff in your office, but also with your bosses to try and work together to solve whatever problems you have creatively. So you may have an idea as Adam did with trying to generate revenue off of his corporate sponsorship packages and his SuperFanU app, which are all great things.

I think that your bosses love to kind of be in on those conversations at the beginning so they're not asking the questions at the end. Find out what's important to your supervisors and your bosses and then try to go back and implement what you've agreed upon and then track it.

So I think that that from a general standpoint is what we try and do. I think Adam mentioned -- sorry to keep putting you on the spot, Adam -- but I think it was great how he had a goal of kind of what he wanted to accomplish with that social media person and doing things in-game on game day that others weren't doing, kind of filling that need.

He saw that. He went in. He saw an effective kind of solution for it, researched and gathered that info. So when he went in to ask for the help, he then had the answers to the questions that they were going to ask.

And I think what's more important, once he got that approved, got that extra money, he was able to follow up by implementing those solutions. And day to day you can see what those solutions are doing, because of the social media presence he has during the game day.

So I think on a specific end, you know, he did exactly what we do on a general end. So that's pretty much what I have. Happy to answer any questions.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: We do have a question from Division II sports information director. This is for all three of you. If there's a suggestion that you have or advice for someone that's having to set up a budget for the first time, what would it be? And if you can identify yourself when you answer, please.

JASON FEIN: I think a simple answer -- this is Jason Fein -- the first thing is, number one, ask for help, because if you have never done it before, there are plenty of people that can probably help you out in your department.

But I think the first thing is try to really look at what your overall goal is and what you need to accomplish. And then break it down from there and get itemized.

So everything you do, as I mentioned, you don't really want to be worrying about having to account for every dime in, dime out and tracking that. You want to have an overall goal and have your budget kind of work towards that overall goal.

ADAM LEDYARD: This is Adam from ETBU. I think also if you're creating a budget from scratch is to look at your home games for the next year and see what you need worker-wise, student-wise, and what you need to pay and kind of get a calculation of what it might take for money to put for workers at the game. I know that's been an issue here when I first got here and they've bolstered my budget with that just because of concerns that I've had.

If you show them that you need workers for A, B, C and D, the table, whatever scorer's table, scoreboards, things like that, you want to pay them this amount, you need to show them why you need that amount of money and how long they're going to work and hopefully they'll see why you want that money.

Another thing, too, if you're starting it from scratch, do an inventory: What kind of equipment do you need? Do you want a second computer for statistics, or a camera for live video or a camera for interviews or camera to take pictures, or different things like that where you go through your office and it will be, okay, I need this, I want this.

Kind of make a wants and a needs list and say, okay, this is what I need now. This is what I want in the future. Kind of what Jason was saying, know where you want to go with things now and in the future and make a budget for both of those and say this is what I want in the future. This is what I need now. And kind of know the areas that you need to grow in and where you want to go in the future with that.

JOHN HEISLER: This is John Heisler. I think the other thing to add to that would be to make sure you have an understanding of what the priorities might be for your coaches and for your athletic director. And then ensure that you're not wasting your time and effort and money in areas that are not perceived as being valuable to those entities.

You may not always completely be on the same page in terms of what's being done. But I think in fairness to the coaches and the programs and trying to support those and ultimately that's what we're all doing; we're trying to support those sports programs to give them the best chance to be successful. If you're not on the same wavelength with them, then it's probably going to be more difficult.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: Thank you. This next question is from Randy, and it's for John Heisler. And it's a two-part question.

What steps have you taken to get your students involved with your digital and social efforts? Is it as simple as reaching out to department heads, or do you try to find students in journalism or PR classes?

JOHN HEISLER: You know, I think we've sat down with every one of our sports individually and their coaching staffs and particularly with the social media aspect of it, you're finding that coaches are all over the map in terms of their interest level. Some of them don't have any interest in Twitter or anything else, and others are actively engaged.

So there doesn't have to be the same answer from one sport to the next. But we try to figure out who amongst the existing staff, whether it's an assistant, whether it's an operations person or someone else, if they can be a part of it, if they can control it and understand what it's all about, that can be great. If they need help, then it's a matter of trying to figure out who you can utilize to supplement that.

And we certainly have utilized students. Because the reality of this is that, for many of these programs, social media is not just a once-every-so-often thing. It's a constant, ongoing thing that goes on. In many cases on an hourly basis all year long, even in the offseason.

JEFF SCHWARTZ: Thank you. A reminder, you can submit any questions that you have for our presenters on the Cover It Live blog.

John, Adam and Jason, thank you for offering your time and expertise to help our membership.

We continue to appreciate Capital One's sponsorship of this year's Continuing Education Series, the Cover It Live blog audio. And ASAP Sports FastScript from today's call will be available for on demand use at CoSIDA.com later today.

Our next call will be on Thursday, February 18th, when we will discuss unique situations and crisis communication issues facing athletic communicators. Thank you to everyone for participating.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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