To future proof you athletic department, you you must have a deep understanding of what makes your customers goals are and what prevents them from reaching those goals.
Once you have that, you can build products and services that fans are willing to pay for.
The Philadelphia Eagles clearly understand this, as evidenced by their newest venture, “Eagles Entertainment.”
The team will be launching an original content studio called Eagles Entertainment that will see the NFL franchise create comedy shows, cooking shows, and human interest documentaries about fans.
“Our mission, essentially, is to be able to entertain Eagles fans everywhere they are, 365 days a year,” explained Jen Kavanagh, the Eagles’ senior vice president of media and marketing.
“The attitude around an off-season doesn’t exist when you have a responsibility to stay connected to 10 million fans across the world who care about your brand.”
This approach shouldn’t be too different from your athletic department’s mindset.
If anything, you have potentially more loyal fans and more teams and personalities to create content with.
To truly become customer-centric, you must stop limiting yourselves to being a traditional athletic department and more towards truly being the front porch of the University – through sports (in every avenue possible), you’re entertaining alumni and fans of the University year round.
This post was inspired by an article from Front Office Sports, to read more: