Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
The following is a sponsored post in partnership with WayPoint.
I could probably write nearly every single day about new strategies for athletic departments to generate revenue without losing the interest of my industry readers.
So many of the traditional methods for generating revenue are capped, or at least, close to their cap. There are only so many tickets you can sell, especially if your arenas are already close to capacity. There’s revenue to be earned from increases in corporate sponsorship, but you can’t sell 14 uniform jersey patches. Each program has a finite number of major donors, and schools can’t ask those handful of people to pay for everything.
So if the number of new corporate partnerships you can sign is limited, and there’s also so many times an athletic department can ask the same 18 rich people to open their checkbooks, the next place athletic departments often look to raise more revenue is their fanbase.
Waypoint CEO Matthew Sanders put it like this. "The problem that we're trying to solve is the massive challenge that athletic departments are facing with the House settlement....fundamentally, how do you take the existing power of your brand, your loyalty with these fans, and turn it and connect with the economic ecosystem already happening around your university?"
Waypoint thinks they’ve found a better way to do this. And it starts with asking a sometimes overlooked question.
Who is a fan?
The Waypoint crew define a fan, for the purposes of the revenue generation department of an athletic department, as somebody who is so invested in an athletic department that they would be willing to do something to advance that team’s interests. It isn’t enough to just “like” the team’s Instagram page or passively consume content…are they willing to take an additional action?
Sanders put it this way to me. “You might drink a lot of Diet Coke. But you probably won’t put Diet Coke drinkers in your social media bio. But you might do that for your alma mater.” Coke consumption isn’t typically seen as critical to one’s personal identity. Fandom, and especially college athletics fandom, is different.
Counting those folks isn’t always easy. Scott Stevens, Waypoint’s CMO told me that when they broach this subject with schools, “one of the only real measurable data points they can rely on is the size of their alumni. That's a great starting point, but, and especially in the P4 world, a school's overall fan base is quite larger than just their alumni. What we want to try and do is figure out, with each university, how we can actually get down to a number, or an estimate, of how many 'fans' they have, or, people who actually care about your brand enough to do something about it.”
He cited faith-based private schools, like BYU and Notre Dame, whose fans often extend to co-religionists who never actually attended the university, or for public schools like West Virginia, who count thousands of “sidewalk fans” as their most fervent supporters.
Waypoint’s tools track fan activity on multiple levels, from social media to message boards to other data brokerages, to come up with not only estimations of the size of particular fanbases, but perhaps even more importantly, tools to help identify the most influential of those fans.
Perhaps the most influential individuals are the athletes themselves, with huge social media followings. But it could also be small business owners, Reddit moderators, alumni association leaders, random fans, or any number of other types of individuals. The important metric here, according to Waypoint, isn’t so much the raw follower count. It’s about which people engage and interact, and what happens next.
The key, according to Waypoint, is to use technology to build out a network to help schools understand not just where their fans are or what else they care about, but who carries influence in that sphere ...who can help encourage other fans to take action.
That network can be turned into revenue in lots of different ways. To start, Waypoint is focused on travel...but they’re setting their sights on more.
Consider Mountaineer Travel, established for current Waypoint partner WVU:
Mountaineer Travel allows WVU fans to directly book flights, hotels, car rentals, etc, all from within a web portal surrounded by university and athletic department branding.
These portals don’t force consumers to use any specific brand or company for their travel. But for every dollar that is spent on travel via that portal, a percentage is sent right back to WVU to support the athletic department.
“This is Crowd Commerce”, said Sanders. "What are the commercial behaviors
that are already existing in your ecosystem that can be brought into the brand?"
Waypoint doesn’t believe their goal needs to be to necessarily encourage WVU fans (or anybody else) to travel more. They’re simply asking them to redirect the spending they were already planning on making to a new portal, which would benefit their favorite team. The fan doesn’t have to pay more money or commit to less convenient flights or airports. They’re just changing their behavior and letting WVU serve as the marketing budget for your original scheduled travel plans.
Sanders and Stevens wanted to start with travel, because the two already have plenty of business experience in that industry. But they don’t see Waypoint as ever just being a tool to help schools set up their own little athletic department Expedia dot com portals. The two see plenty of other spending categories, from cell phone plans to automotive insurance, credit cards, and more.
If enough fans (or for that matter, small business owners) shift some of their existing spending to slightly different firms or channels, it could create very significant new revenue streams for athletic departments…all without raising a single price on consumers.
But that doesn’t have to be the only use for this technology. Both Stevens and Sanders told me they envision a world where schools would want to identify more of their most influential fans and work with not, just not for commercial partnerships, but to help spread the word about university events, feature stories on athletes, and more.
These might be the sort of folks who would also be most motivated by things other than cash, Sanders noted. Athletic departments control key experiences and access which may be even more special to a highly influential fan than a less-engaged donor.
But you can’t do any of that without knowing who your real fans actually are, and how to contact them. That’s what Waypoint is working to build.
Because at the end of the day, my business and the business of BYU or Florida State athletics have a lot in common. We’re about trying to secure attention. What you do with that attention (sell an ad, sell a ticket, encourage a social share, disparage a rival, etc) is up to you. But without the attention, there’s no commerce.
