Battle of the Fans
March 27, 2012
Guests at the MHSAA Girls and Boys Basketball Tournaments at Michigan State University’s Breslin Center the past two weekends saw the result of the MHSAA’s first “Battle of the Fans.” The idea came from the MHSAA’s Student Advisory Council, and it spread through social media. Read about it here.
We embraced this idea of our Student Advisory Council because a “Battle of the Fans” is something we can do, and most other youth sports cannot. In the world of youth sports, fans are almost unique to school sports. Fans aren’t found at AAU tournaments or US Soccer Development Academies like they are at school sports events.
We embraced this idea because fans are a part of what defines school sports and makes high school sports different than other youth sports, and makes interscholastic athletics a tradition in the United States like nowhere else in the world.
We embraced this idea because some people say that high school sports attendance is down and school spirit is declining. This initiative demonstrates that is not true everywhere, and doesn’t need to be true anywhere. It can help to motivate better spirit in more schools.
We embraced this idea to get more people talking about what is and is not good sportsmanship, and to encourage students to reengage in school events in more positive ways. This should make for more and even better competition, and dialogue, in 2013.
The Social Setting
March 18, 2014
Between these headlines was one of more significance: Facebook announced that it would be paying $19 billion to purchase WhatsApp. Which means social media is here to stay. And everybody, including big time basketball coaches, needs to deal with it in better ways than merely blasting it and/or barring it.
What it means for an organization like mine is that everything we do needs to be considered in all the usual goals, objectives and strategies progressions, and that at least one progression must have social media as an outcome and almost all progressions must have social media as a tactic.
Just over a decade ago we realized that almost every task we have has an information technology component. We discovered we needed our IT staff in the room when new projects or protocols were being considered, when new policies were being developed, and when all sorts of problems were being addressed. Fail to involve IT personnel soon enough or at all, we learned, and failure of the enterprise was assured.
We are at the same point today with social media. If we neglect the social media component – fail to consider how to use it to the advantage of the project or fail to consider how adverse social media could doom the project – we operate with at least one hand tied behind our back.
Just as the IT staff have needed to be consulted, and listened to, in order for the enterprise to reach its potential, so must our social media staff have a seat at the table and a voice in the discussion of anything of consequence we might think we should do.
This is as true for nonprofit organizations as it is for profit, for small organizations and large, both private and public.