DATA CAN DRIVE SUCCESS IN SPORTS AND HIGHER ED Mike Banville, CEO, SSBMany companies today realize they need to forge closer and individualized connections with their customers, and they understand that technology can help them like never before. That said, surprisingly few organizations do this effectively. Why? Because they often overlook an important step.

Building deeper engagements with customers begins with assembling a set of clean, comprehensive touchpoint data around them and seamlessly integrating it into the fabric of business operations to have a quantifiable impact it in a sustainable, repeatable way.

AT SSB, WE CALL THIS A CLEAN DATA FOUNDATION, AND IT’S THE GATEWAY TO MAXIMIZING BUSINESS PERFORMANCE.Too many organizations skip the data-gathering phase and jump to workflow tools like customer relationship management software. CRM platforms are valuable and excel in providing a sharp view into the data, but the engine is the data management platform. It can create the 360-degree view and harnesses the full power of the data from the business systems in use across the organization. Integrated together, the data management platform and the CRM platform jointly deliver a meticulous customer experience.

Some industries do this better than others. Supermarkets, for example, use our shopping history to deliver laser-targeted offers and rewards to us. Furthermore, companies like Amazon relentlessly analyze customer touchpoint data to serve up personalized buying experiences on every page we visit. This is how you get customers to spend more money.

While not at the level of CPG companies or travel companies yet, two industries that are beginning to embrace the clean data foundation approach are professional sports franchises and higher education institutions. Each could do a much better job of engaging their customers – students, alumni, and sports fans – with personally crafted messages.

Universities typically have access to ample information about alumni, donors, and fans. This information includes where they live, how much they’ve donated to the school, and whether they attend reunions or buy sports tickets. There’s no excuse for sending them generic mail about events in cities where they don’t live or pitching single-game football tickets to a local CEO who might buy season tickets or luxury box seats. That’s not to say we should overlook small donors. Higher Education instutions should emphasize cultivating and growing engaged relationships through the full cycle of donation and philanthropic touch points and opportunities. In fact, the massive decline in state funding means academic institutions need to find new sources of revenue like never before. Instead of relying solely on big dollar benefactors, they must seek out many more people who can donate smaller amounts. That requires highly connected data to identify, segment, and engage with a wider range of alumni and fans.

UNIVERSITIES HAVE MORE PEOPLE RAISING

THEIR HANDS AND ENGAGING THEM THAN

THEY CURRENTLY KNOW OR HAVE BEEN ABLE

TO CONNECT WITH. A MORE ADVANCED DATA

ARCHITECTURE WILL HELP TO IDENTIFY AND

TO ENGAGE THEM.

In the sports business, the challenge is to expand the customer experience to embrace casual fans and to develop new fans while also connecting with diehards in new ways. From the University athletic department perspective, they are limited in the number of levers that can be pulled to impact the bottom line. Ticket sales, donations, and ancillary revenue streams are facing increasing pressure to yield results due to the fixed nature of television rights and sponsorship revenues on many University campuses.

SSB PERSPECTIVES

SPORTS TEAMS AND HIGHER ED: GET CLOSER TO YOUR CUSTOMERS AND CONSTITUENTS

SPRING/SUMMER 2019

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SPORTS TEAMS AND HIGHER ED (CONT.)More than ever, athletic departments and sports franchises need a highly connected set of information around anyone that’s interacted with them to create a systematically organized and complete picture of each fan that results in great customer relationships.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s the relatively low volumes of data generated by academia and sports franchises. Industries like retail and financial services deal with much larger and complex amounts of real-time data that presents much bigger challenges.

That means organizations that understand their problems and commit to solving them will find them entirely solvable. And they don’t need to spend millions of dollars on outside consultants.

Yet the costs will go up each day they fail to recognize and tackle those problems. That includes the opportunity cost of waiting. The competition is getting ahead in the meantime, building a lead they may never relinquish.

IT’S TIME FOR SPORTS FRANCHISES AND

UNIVERSITY ATHLETIC DEPARTMENTS

TO DEPLOY MODERN TECHNOLOGY MORE

EFFECTIVELY, BEGINNING WITH A CLEAN

DATA FOUNDATION THAT UNDERPINS GREAT

CUSTOMER CONNECTIONS.

This powers the systems that analyze that data, filter the signals from the noise, and connect the findings to their teams. These systems will provide the easily interpretable and actionable strategic insights that will drive business outcomes. Organizations that do this successfully will find new sources of revenue and stay ahead of their competition in the years to come.

Last month, SSB presented a three-day Collegiate Summit exploring innovations that can help academic institutions build stronger leaders and generate more revenue from athletic programs, the development office and anintegrated university ecosystem.

Industry executives and leaders from major universities joined SSB staff at

the University of Maryland in College Park to examine the shifting higher

education landscape and how data and analytics can transform the way

universities do business.

Be on the lookout for SSB to share more content and information from

the Summit in the coming weeks.

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PLEASE NOTE THE NEW ADDRESS:

BOWERS PARK II BUILDING

6640 CAROTHERS PKWY

SUITE 100

FRANKLIN, TN 37067

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map-marker-altTHE SSB

NASHVILLE OFFICE

HAS MOVED

Q&A TURNING KNOWLEDGE INTO CURRENCYTIM HILLPRESIDENT & GM, HIGHER EDUCATION, BLACKBAUD

Q: What are the greatest opportunities for higher education in adopting the latest technology in and around data clarity and analytics?

A: The opportunity is to reinvent the way universities drive revenue, using knowledge as currency. Most academic institutions are just at the early stages of understanding how big this opportunity is and what they should do with it. It’s bigger than just athletics, spanning every department on campus.

Institutions of all sizes need to maintain and grow a sustainable income that allows them to extend their reach and their mission. Just as companies need to understand and analyze the data from across their enterprise to thrive, so, too, do universities. The data show what products and services to offer, how much to charge for them, what customers need, and how to make the right investments. For a university, that means attracting, enrolling, and matriculating students through the system. They need rich, predictive analytics on those students to bring them in and then to keep them enrolled. When a student doesn’t matriculate, when they drop out or transfer, that means a loss of tuition and fees. And then you start all over with the recruiting process to replace that student.

It’s the same across the other fundraising areas of the institution. We know the importance of athletics to most schools, not only to attract students and talent to the institution, but also the actual income stream from the operations of athletics. It helps to have that rich data on constituents -- season ticket holders, alumni, people in the vicinity of your campus who like to attend sporting events, as well as corporations and vendor partners who support the institution with food and beverage services, merchandise sales, advertising and donations. Building the annual fund, large one-time gifts, or endowments can all be tightly knitted together with that knowledge, that currency that comes with data. It helps reach constituents with personalized, content-rich messaging in email, pop-up events, social media, and athletic or arts and cultural events on campus.

The key that unlocks knowledge, that currency, is leveraging data analytics and BI tools. This is no longer a nice to have, it’s a prerequisite for success for every office across the campus.

Q: What hurdles do higher education institutions have to navigate to realize these goals?

A: The biggest hurdle is just recognizing the value that comes from leveraging the data, and being willing to invest in it. To collect it, to analyze it, to use it -- there’s a hard cost to that. The cost can be lowered by licensing the technology that makes it possible. But it starts by understanding the value of researching prospects to raise money, sell students on coming to school, hire employees, or sell tickets in stadiums. Data helps build affinity with alumni and local communities. You have to be willing to extend the budget.

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SO, YOU NEED THE TECHNOLOGY

AND THE BUDGET, AND THE FINAL

THING YOU NEED IS PEOPLE.

You can have all the data analytics and BI performance management tools in the world, with the right vendors and consultants, and the software. But you also need data analysts and database administrators on campus. Which means you have to go out and recruit top talent, just like any business.

Q: Is it a challenge to get leaders across a university to collaborate in this new environment?

A: We need to break down the barriers and the silos between athletics, university advancement, alumni officers, and the university foundation. People might get the rich data in admissions or the bursar’s office. Sometimes they’re reticent to share that data, but that’s an outdated notion. We should be sharing data so we can all further our mission, so we can reach all of our goals.When you put guard rails around how that data can be used, it encourages sharing. You see people communicating better across the campus – or the business, or government agency – and contributing to each other’s success.

Q: What are some best practices for academic institutions as they embark on this journey of data management and analytics?

A: Often the data analytics program sits in the CIO’s office, but it could sit with the chief marketing officer or even the university president’s office, given its broad strategic value. It’s important to build a framework for managing the data and guidelines for sharing it. It’s important for the university president to care deeply about business intelligence. That helps bring broad-based strategy to things like choosing the best vendors, third-party data and software for a given university. You can also examine the best practice of peers in higher education, which are often shared through industry cohorts. And finally, it may sound simple, but adoption is actually a best practice. So many times, whether it’s in higher education, healthcare or any industry, people neglect this step. Somebody gets excited, it might be the university president or CIO, about how they can leverage data. So, they pay for third-party data, analytics software, even third-party consultants to come in and help. But they never get the adoption and the daily usage, because they face

resistance from inside the institution. The best solution is strong support from the university president and other top officers.

DATA AND ANALYTICS SHOULD BE

WOVEN INTO THE SCHOOL’S MISSION

AND THE VISION, SO THAT IT BECOMES

PART OF THE FABRIC OF HOW THE

UNIVERSITY OPERATES. REMEMBER

THAT KNOWLEDGE IS CURRENCY.

AND THAT APPLIES TO EVERY

DEPARTMENT ACROSS CAMPUS

Whether you’re selling sports tickets in the local community or reaching out to alumni, data helps you deliver a smarter message and gives you have a much better chance of breaking through. And we’re still just at the leading edge of this thing. It’s really exciting.

Tim Hill is President and General Manager of Higher Education Solutions at Blackbaud. Blackbaud is the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good and a close SSB partner in data intelligence on behalf of higher education institutions.

WE NEED TO BREAK DOWN THE BARRIERS

AND THE SILOS BETWEEN ATHLETICS,

UNIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT, ALUMNI OFFICERS,

AND THE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION.

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