Technological innovation could be the next major growth opportunity for sports in 2019. To reach new audiences, attract new demographics, and convert casual viewers into passionate fans, sport organizations and athletes alike will benefit from the use of digital technology. Find out more in Show Me the Money, an industry report featuring insights from leaders across the professional sport ecosystem.
This week a recommendation report from the Federal-Provincial/Territorial (F-P/T) Sport Committee’s Work Group on Women and Girls in Sport was released, aimed at increasing the participation and leadership of women and girls in all aspects of sport. The report outlines an ultimate vision for women and girls in sport, details strategic outcomes that must be achieved to realize that vision, and provides recommendations for F-P/T governments. Highlights include a call for accountability mechanisms, incentivized and enforced by F-P/T funding bodies; the use of research and data to inform program design and decision-making; equitable portrayal and promotion of women and girls in the sport media; and a continued emphasis on preventing and addressing abuse, harassment and discrimination.
While social media can have many positive uses for athletes, from interacting with fans to providing value for sponsors, engagement can also pose risks to performance. In today’s blog, Olympic curler Lisa Weagle provides insight into the steps she and her teammates used leading up to Pyeongchang to control the impact of social media on their mental health and wellbeing.
SIRC’s Athlete Perspective series provides insight and recommendations on key issues from an athlete’s perspective. The collection of blogs and SIRCuit articles profiles Canada’s Olympic and Paralympic athletes and taps into their lived experience.
While social media can have many positive uses for athletes, such as interacting with fans, creating a brand, and providing value for sponsors, unfortunately, engaging in social media can hinder athletic performance.
At the beginning of the last quadrennial, my curling team had ongoing discussions with our support team about social media use, both for us as individuals as well as for our team. Our support team suggested that social media could hurt our performance on the ice for a number of reasons:
Our support team suggested something radical—that we eliminate our social media use completely. We decided that it wasn’t realistic to go totally dark, but we began a journey that took us from 2013 through to Pyeongchang. Through it I became aware of my social media habits and made some changes that I believe have had a positive impact on my on-ice performance as well as my mental well-being. Here are the steps we followed:
It can be eye-opening to see exactly how many minutes of your day are spent on social media. In fact, just being aware of a habit can be enough to change it. In addition to time spent, we also tracked our emotional quality and how engaging with social media changed our moods.
This was a simple change that made a huge difference. Turning off notifications removed a frequent prompt to engage with social media.
This doesn’t mean deleting your account, just the app on your phone, so you have to log in from another device like a computer or iPad to access your accounts. I found this significantly reduced my overall daily social media time.
Through our tracking, it became clear for me that social media was a time-consuming habit. I realized I was reaching for my phone when I was bored, so I started carrying a book with me. It’s much easier to change a habit when you have something else to replace it.
We used the quadrennial before the 2018 Winter Olympic Games to try different levels of social media engagement. For some events we had a total social media blackout. For others we left it up to each individual player. We tracked it and worked with our support team to figure out what we each need.
Instead of an outright ban, our team decided to allow each player to decide how much she wanted to engage with social media. We created some shared guidelines, and had the understanding that we were each responsible for making decisions around social media use that would lead to our best performances on the ice.
It can be really hard to go dark on social media, especially during major events when there is more attention on you as an athlete. This can be a valuable opportunity to engage with fans and sponsors and build your brand. We have a trusted friend manage our team accounts, so he can filter the messages we receive and post content to our accounts.
While professional teams and leagues have teams of media relations and social media professionals dedicated to maintaining a presence for their fans year-round, most amateur sport organizations have one or two individuals who handle communications and marketing off the sides of their desk. Far too often, the people tasked with promoting athletes and teams are fixated on results – posting the score with a short summary seems to be the “go-to” communication. However, in a fast-paced, content-heavy world, those results are “here today and gone tomorrow” – null as soon as the next game begins, or forgotten as the post moves down fans’ news feeds.
Think about the medals Canadians won at the last Olympic and Paralympic Games. What was the winning score or result? Unless you are intimately connected to a particular sport, you likely could not answer that question. When it comes to promoting sports, we need to do a better job of storytelling. We need to plant a seed that makes the reader or viewer want to pay attention to the athletes, and in the process, their next match or season. For all the practice and effort needed to become a champion, recognition that comes with it is often fickle at best.
The five tips below will help you take a more strategic approach to communication activities to build strong connections between your organization, fans, key stakeholders (e.g. funders, alumni), and the athletes, coaches and support staff.
5 Tips to Promote your Team
1. Identify a goal
What is it you hope your content will accomplish? Do you want more spectators? Do you want to increase exposure to the sport? Whatever that goal is, work from there to develop a plan and build content that accomplishes that goal. Providing scores and summaries, as discussed, has a short shelf-life. Videos, blogs, images, GIFs, Snapchat montages and many other forms of showcasing your athletes, coaches and sports are key to telling a story and achieving your goal.
2. Be Creative
Think outside the box to develop creative content to tell stories, profile organizational or team culture, and engage your audience. Create introductory videos of athletes and key staff to build familiarity. Write a weekly blog to build interest in the team’s goals. Show off athletic prowess (or funny bloopers) through videos of athletes mastering challenging coordination or balance drills. Assemble a montage of game highlights, or of athletes singing along to their favourite “pump up” song. Tweet team mantras or inspiring quotes.
3. Be Prepared
Review your athletic schedule and develop a plan of attack for the whole season. You want things to have a “controlled fluidity”. Develop templates for media releases, photos and videos to speed up your workflow and maintain a strong visual theme. Producing core content during training camps or early in the season will create a bank of content to release throughout the year, freeing up time during the height of the season to focus on emerging opportunities that will contribute to your communication goals.
4. Choose an audience
Obviously you want the widest and most diverse audience possible, but the key is to have a core group in mind for your content. Different genders, ages and various demographic attributes make a difference when creating content. Your identified goal and your audience should complement one another. If you want new fans, who do you want those fans to be? How do you reach them? Consider conducting small focus groups of that demographic to identify what content they want and will consume.
5. Execute
Whatever type of content you produce, produce it well. If you want to create video, seek out professional guidance about the type of content you want to develop. If you want to use photography, designate someone to be solely responsible for shooting photos. Don’t be afraid to re-purpose content to speed up workflows and increase your reach to audiences across various platforms.
When teams win championships, coaches are often quoted following the game talking about already looking ahead to the next season. In many ways, sports fans and observers are the same. By following some of these tips, your audience of fans and other stakeholders will be provided with content that complements the scores and keeps your team or sport in the conversation. Developing strategic promotion of people that coincides with your sporting calendar takes foresight and discipline…but isn’t that what we ask of our athletes and coaches
Looking for examples? Take a look at these unique sport video communications…
Drop the graphics, and this is solid promotional video that you can add to a social media feed and grab eyeballs/interest.
You might not have a clip from the President of the United States, but this is a simple, effective and compelling player profile
This profile highlights that you don’t just have to use highlights for a player profile. Dig deep and let them tell you about themselves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQh6Oyn6VU4
It’s always great to go behind the scenes whenever possible. These videos are often captivating/inspiring and can extend beyond the game.
Don’t hesitate to have fun with your team. Take calculated risks (always protect your brand) and create content that is unique and different. This video was shot for mobile audiences; specifically Instagram.
This article presents a case study of how stakeholder collaborations can maximize engagement. The case is based off of a collaboration between the Sport Information Resource Centre and Dr. Ann Pegararo from Laurentian University exploring an analysis of social media communications around important announcements in the conversation around concussion in sport.
Learnings show:
Social Listening Analytics:
2017 Sport Canada Research Initiative (SCRI) Conference Knowledge Transfer Presentation
SIRC is pleased to be working together with Sport Canada to share current research on topics informing policy and promoting quality sport programming. This week we are sharing highlights of a recent article reviewing a research study examining CANADIAN NATIONAL SPORT ORGANIZATIONS’ USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA.
“Birds of a Feather”: An Institutional Approach to Canadian National Sport Organizations’ Social-Media Use. Naraine, M. L., & Parent, M. M. (2016). International Journal Of Sport Communication, 9(2), 140-162.
SIRC Highlights from the research
Social media has been deemed as a valuable tool for companies and organizations to build relationships with consumers. Previous research has identified that not-for-profit sport organizations primarily use social media as a communication tools rather than as a marketing tool. Recognizing the need for research into the area of communication behaviours of sport organizations, the purpose of this study was to compare and contrast Canadian national sport organizations’ (NSO) social media presence and communication behaviours based on the environmental context in which they operate. The authors use institutional theory – specifically isomorphism – as the framework of their analysis which is a new approach to the social media and sport research sphere. This framework promotes a shift in research beyond examining social media content for marketing or user gratification to examining content to explain the environmental pressures affecting organizational practice. This study specifically looked at Twitter as the social media platform of focus and looks to see if NSO Twitter use differs from organization to organization or whether a ‘one size fits all’ approach is the common strategy.
To contextualize the framework, Isomorphism refers to “the process by which organizations in a similar environment achieve homogeneity in their practices”. In this framework there are three types of pressures within the environment that organizations operate, that cause them to be similar: (1) coercive pressures – where powerful entities (e.g. political structures) apply pressure to adopt specific action or risk potential sanctions (e.g. restricting resources); (2) mimetic pressure – where a survey of the environment by the organization identifies successes of other organizations which promotes adoption of those practices to stay relevant; and (3) normative pressures – where drawing from the same pool of resources for money and knowledge is a consequence of professionalization overseen by educational or regulatory bodies.
The following two research questions were investigated through an exploratory qualitative thematic analysis:
NSOs were grouped based upon number of Twitter followers and two NSO’s from each of four groupings were randomly chosen respecting representation from both summer and winter sports. The eight NSOs studied were Skate Canada, Tennis Canada, Canadian Freestyle Ski Association, Rowing Canada, Bobsleigh Canada, Sail Canada, Luge Canada, and Fencing Canada.
Highlights from the results:
Although NSOs and the sports they represent are by their very nature unique, coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures have combined to create a conforming environment of social media communication and provide reasons for the lack of followership growth by less salient NSOs. As the authors submit “this study offers practitioners of these types of organizations an opportunity to reflect on their own current practices and those of other similar organizations to determine whether their current practices are sufficient or whether change is necessary.” Change could generate followership growth and extend the potential audience and reach for less salient NSOs.
Further research in this area could extend to examining NSOs in other countries, to other levels of sport organizations (club, community, etc.), or to other types of sport organizations (professional sport, sport retailers, sponsors, etc). Future research should also look to broaden the scope of alternative social media communication strategies outside of the “status quo”, take a longitudinal approach in examining the effect of Olympic years on isomorphic behaviours of NSOs, or study the stakeholders in the social media networks of NSOs to determine power and influence of these dynamic networks which could have an impact on NSO communication practices.
Join us for a discussion on governance topics in the not for profit world. This webinar will cover such areas as good governance practices, various models of Board structure, the role & responsibilities of Directors, policies and their purpose. In addition, an update Ontario Not for Profit Corporations Act will be provided.
Resources:
Board Orientation
Board Skills Matrices
Policy Models
Social Media Policy
Webinar supported in part by SIRC, Ottawa Sport Council and Sport Canada
#YearofSport
In this webinar you will learn the best practices of Twitter. How to set up your account, find and follow other people and/or organizations, build your follower base to build your business.
Find out how to get started. How do you build an audience, and create a network that will help you grow awareness towards your cause, organization or business.
Attendees will learn:
The 2014 COC webinar series will kick off on September 17 at 1pm Eastern with the first in a series of webinars on Revenue Generation in NSFs. The webinar is the first in a series presented by the COC as part of the NSF Enhancement Initiative. The topic of the webinar series this year, Revenue Generation, was developed using data generated from the Deloitte NSF assessments.
With that theme developed, and with the leadership of the COC Marketing and Revenue Generation Committee and its Chair Gene Edworthy, we have developed a series of webinars for the coming months. The webinars will be hosted by our partners at SIRC.
The first webinar will feature Kevin Gilmore, Chief Operating Officer of the Montreal Canadiens; Mark Rubinstein, CEO of Alpine Canada and Greg Stremlaw, CEO of the Canadian Curling Association. The speakers will discuss the revenue potential in sport properties and what they have done to grow and sustain revenues in their organizations. As with all of the webinars in the series, there will be time left for questions, comments and discussion among the leaders joining us on the call.