How schools can actually make more money selling tickets

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in the participate in the Big East’s inaugural Revenue Summit, held just across the street from Wrigley Field. The event brought athletic directors, conference office staffers, campus-level business personnel, and industry experts to discuss various strategies for improving revenue across the Big East.

Experts from professional sports, sponsorship sales, ticketing, licensing and fan experience all spoke, while a few journalists (like me) moderated the conversations.

I legitimately think these sorts of events are a good idea for most college conferences, even smaller ones in Division II and Division III, as it’s good to compare notes among member institutions and figure out what sorts of responsibilities or projects should be done at the conference level, among collaborating institutions or completely individually.

Perhaps my single biggest takeaway from those conversations? Most everybody in college sports has figured out that customer data is very important. It isn’t enough for a school to just sell somebody a ticket to a basketball game on its website … the school should understand who that person is so it can better market them other tickets, experiences, donations, etc.

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So schools — or trusted ticketing, website or marketing vendors — are collecting that data. The trickier questions are: What do you do with that data? And how can you find even more information to better enrich the data you already have?

That’s a book, not a single newsletter, I’m afraid.

But those conversations did get me thinking about a company I recently talked to, FanFeed, that appears to have a slightly different approach to fan data.

If I understand the product correctly, FanFeed creates an opt-in social network for fans to share their experiences at various live events (like sporting events, concerts, etc.). FanFeed then uses data from photographs shared in that app to enrich fan databases that schools control. This way, schools could get consumer information even from events where they don’t formally ticket, like many Olympic sports.

The founders, Cole Rubin and Jack Phifer, told me they only use data that is specifically opt-ed in, rather than scraping from social media or databases where users haven’t given explicit and express permission. But this information, coupled with the company’s FanOS tool that is meant to integrate information from across campuses or from multiple datasets, could give schools better understanding of their current customers.

This technology could also be integrated into apps that schools control, like a system for proving fan loyalty points. If a school knows which students showed up to an unticketed women’s soccer game, it could, for example, give those students discounts, better tickets or unique experiences for when they show up to a volleyball game.

The most important thing to me isn’t so much “use this CRM or this vendor or this product” as is the idea of encouraging schools to think about what they could learn from potentially more unconventional datasets — and then how they actually try to convert their massive spreadsheets into marketing campaigns, pricing strategies, pitch decks and more.

That stuff is all important. An extra thousand dollars here, a thousand dollars there, and suddenly, you can afford to buy some better college basketball games on your schedule. You can fly instead of take a bus. Or maybe you can play one fewer guarantee game. And over time, all that stuff adds up.

I even stayed up for this, but as of 10:37 PM CT, the Protect College Sports Act isn’t scheduled for a vote before the Senate goes on summer vacation for the rest of the month.

Even after all the haggling and horsetrading with the Big Ten and SEC leadership to bring the bill back from the dead, the act’s chances of actually passing aren’t great at the moment…mostly for reasons that have little to do with college sports.

The problem with trying to rush through everything now, right before Senators head back to their home states to do some campaignin’, is that it turns out the US Senate has a lot of other priorities beyond regulating college athlete compensation. There are nominees to confirm, a major budget bill, huge legislation touching on Russia sanctions, cryptocurrency regulations, this whole Iran War business, and more, and lawmakers basically needed everything to go perfectly to get a vote on college sports squeezed in.

Not everything went perfectly. Three lawmakers who don’t really want this thing to pass in the first place introduced amendments that will make voting for the PCSA much harder for Democrats. Then, the Congressional Black Caucus came out against the bill.

There’s still a chance the act could get thrown onto the schedule later on Friday, or that a recess could be delayed. And even if the Senate does vote on this thing, it’s still gotta pass the House, and the calculus there is just as tricky as it is with the Senate.

It’s funny…this is the first college sports form bill that has ever generated any meaningful bipartisan support, and it probably has 60 votes in the Senate. But like many promising drives I’ve watched on the field…it sure looks like the clock might run out before this one gets to the goal line.

For next week, I’ve got a big product announcement that will impact everybody (free and premium) who reads of Extra Points, a fun reported story on uniform patches on non-football and basketball uniforms and other unique stories.

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Thanks for reading, everybody. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on the internet.