Brainstorm
Decide on a fan participation activity that is appropriate for the sporting event at which it will be conducted and determine what's in it for your business. You want an activity that is exciting and/or entertaining enough to draw people to the event.
Appropriate fan participation activities for a football game would be a field goal attempt or a football toss for accuracy. Appropriate basketball game activities would be a half-court shot attempt, a three-point field goal attempt, or making three consecutive foul shots. An appropriate soccer match activity would be a shot attempt at an empty net from midfield. An appropriate baseball game activity would be attempting to throw three consecutive strikes.
You must be able to complete your activity during a regularly scheduled lull in the selected sporting event. For example, if it is a football game, you must be able to complete the activity during halftime. If your school's football games feature halftime performances, such as a marching band, your activity must fit into the time slot that begins after the marching band leaves the field and before the teams take the field for the second half. Soccer games have three periods, so your activity can take place during either or both of the breaks between those periods. Baseball games have short breaks between each inning, but, perhaps the best time for a fan participation activity would be just before the game begins.
The degree of difficulty of the activity you select will determine the value of the prizes your class will be able to solicit from business sponsors. For example, a local car dealer might be convinced to offer a free car to anyone who can make a basket shooting from half court, but that same dealer would never agree to offer a free car if the attempts were to take place from the foul line. So, if your goal is to obtain a really valuable prize offering, you need to make your activity an extremely difficult one. If, instead, you want contestants to have a good chance at winning, then the prize you offer must be valued accordingly.
Prior to making your final decision, answer the following questions as concisely as possible:
Will this activity be considered exciting enough or entertaining enough to convince people who might not otherwise attend the event to at least think about doing so?
Identify businesses in your community that could benefit from sponsoring these activities. As each business is identified, think of some ideas for prizes the business could provide to contestants who successfully complete the activity.
Assign Responsibilities
Assign responsibilities for organizing, promoting, and conducting the activities.
Your Company’s Management Team will need to be responsible for documenting the exact nature of the fan participation activity being proposed, and for securing the permission of the involved coaches and your school's Principal.
Your Marketing Team will need to be responsible for securing business sponsors and prizes for the activities. Working with your Company’s Web Site Operations Team, your Marketing Department also needs to figure out how to effectively promote and cover the participation activity at your Web site. And finally, the Marketing Team needs to figure out how buzz will be built for the activity in your local media, and at the sporting events themselves.
Have your Company’s Web site Content Team actually run the activity at the event itself.
Get Permission
Ask the coaches of the involved team for their permission to conduct the activities during games. Once you have the coaches' permission, ask the principal of your school for his/her permission to conduct the activities.
The team responsible for planning & permissions will need to document a complete description of the proposed fan participation activities so that both the involved team coaches and your school's principal understand exactly what will be taking place. This team will need to make appointments with the coaches and Principal to present the plan verbally, deliver their written version personally, and obtain a firm decision date from each party. It is important to remember to give the coaches and principal at least two weeks before the first planned activity is scheduled to take place to grant their approval.
Secure Sponsors
Create a document that describes all of the benefits sponsors of these activities will receive. These benefits could include:
The sponsor’s business receives exposure at the most heavily attended interscholastic sporting events in your community.
The sponsor receives a banner ad at your Web site, plus a link to the sponsor's own Web site.
Have the PA announcer at the game read a short advertisement from the sponsor before the activity takes place.
The sponsor’s name will be mentioned in all press releases regarding this activity that are distributed to local media.
The document should also include complete costs and requirements for sponsorship. Consider the following:
Charge as much as $100 per game for sponsoring one of these activities. Charge a lesser amount per game if a business is willing to sponsor the entire season.
Require the sponsor to donate a prize if the event participant is able to successfully complete the activity. Remind the sponsor that the difficulty of the activity can be increased in direct proportion to the value of the prize offering. Set a minimum prize value of at least $25 and make sure you include the fact that gift certificates are acceptable.
Begin by contacting all the candidate businesses and then decide if you should establish the first contact with each business by postal mail, telephone, or a personal visit.
Be sure you include information on how to become a sponsor at the area of your Web site used to promote the fan participation activities.
Regardless of how you initially contact each sponsor, make sure they understand what they need to do to actually order a sponsorship. After the initial contact, make sure each business is contacted again, using a different form of communication than you used for the first contact. For example, if you made the initial contact via a letter, call them on the phone to make the follow-up contact.
Promote Fan Participation Activities
Dedicate a page of your Web site to promote fan participation activities. (Visit the Lincoln High School demonstration Web site to see an example of a page promoting fan participation activities.)
As soon as you have received the coaches’ and principal's permission to proceed with your activity, make sure to describe the activity and activity rules at your Web site. If you need sponsors, include a sponsorship appeal at the site that incorporates many of the same points detailed in step 4.
Once you have secured sponsorships, you will need to post banner ads for your sponsor(s) and include descriptions of the prizes that will be awarded if the activity is successfully completed according to the rules you have established.
You can even require fans who want to participate in the activity to sign up at your Web site. This technique would only be effective if you have secured sponsorships for the activity for an entire season of home games. Since these activities may require contestants to physically exert themselves, it is important that you take precautions to guard against a contestant getting hurt. For example, you don't want to permit a 65-year-old woman to attempt a forty-yard field goal kick. To avoid such situations, you may choose to limit contestant eligibility to just students of your school or people under a certain age.
Once an actual fan participation activity has taken place, a member of your class should write an article about what transpired that includes quotes from the contestant(s) and is accompanied by pictures of the event itself.
Distribute a Press Release
When you have secured all permissions and sponsorships and you are certain the activity will take place, write a press release describing the contest and identifying the sponsor and prizes. Distribute the release to all local media resources at least one week prior to the event during which the activity will take place. If you are going to require sign-ups for the contest at your Web site, be sure to include sign-up instructions in your release.
Promote the Event
Now your class needs to create a “buzz” about the event, within both your school and the entire community. Be sure to include a promotion for the event that can be read during your school's morning announcements. Create posters that can be hung around the school and in public places in your community. Sponsor contestant sign-ups in the cafeteria during lunch period. If possible, display the prize at your Web site during the sign-up and at the event during which the activity will take place. Make sure the public address announcer at the game builds up anticipation for the activity with periodic announcements leading up to it. Your goal is to make the activity so popular that people in your school and community go crazy trying to get selected to participate and businesses in your town are jumping at the opportunity to sponsor one.
Make Sure the Event Runs Smoothly and Professionally
Have your staffing team perform a rehearsal with a mock contestant the day before the real event is scheduled to take place, or the morning before the game. Make sure all the equipment necessary to conduct the contest is available. Practice timing. You need to get the entire activity completed in a certain amount of time, so make sure you can meet your time requirements during the rehearsal. Make sure your activity staff knows and enforces the rules you have established for the contest.
Write complete instructions and a complete script for the person who will be announcing the activity to the assembled crowd. If local media is covering the event, give them a copy of the same script. Make sure you figure out a way to get each contestant's name, age, and address included in the script. During rehearsal, try to think of all the things that might go wrong during the activity and come up with strategies to avoid those things. For example, what if the wind is blowing so hard that the ball keeps blowing of the kicking tee during the field goal attempt? What if the announcer forgets to read the sponsor's ad before or after the event? If your activity requires a contestant to throw three straight strikes with a baseball, you will need a catcher, an umpire, and a baseball glove for the contestant who is throwing the pitches. It is better to have more staff on hand than you need rather than less.
If the contestant successfully completes the activity and wins the prize, be ready to present it immediately following the activity itself. Remember to take lots of digital pictures of everything so that you can post some at your Web site.
Announce the Results
Regardless whether the activity resulted in a winner or a loser, you will want to make sure to cover the results, in detail, at your Web site - and to do so as quickly as possible. Hopefully, your local media will include coverage of your activity in their reports and articles about the game itself.
Review and Analyze the Results
Sit down as a class and examine the results of this effort. How much revenue did it generate? How many visits did the activity area of your Web site receive? How much coverage did the event receive in the local media? Were you able to create a lot of buzz about the event in your school and community? Did the activity execute as smoothly as you expected? What surprised you the most? What disappointed you the most? What would you do differently the next time? How could you increase the amount of revenue, the number of site visits, the publicity, or the buzz if you did this again?
