Strategic Thinking In Uncertain Times

Strategic Thinking In Uncertain Times

Related Content
• #CoSIDA2020 Canceled due to COVID-19; CoSIDA Content and Resources
• CoSIDA Coffee Shop
• 2019-20 Capital One Continuing Education/Professional Development Programming 

9986Register Online (Free)
Part Five: Listening and Leading Webinar Series (Presented by Capital One)
Realizing the Value of Communications Pros: A first look at the 2020 CoSIDA Salary Survey
Making a case for why SIDs are essential, and what we can do to frame our future.
Time: 2 PM (ET) / 1 PM (CT) / NOON (MT) / 11 AM (PT)

 
WATCH: ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Part Four: Listening and Leading Webinar Series (Presented by Capital One)
Content Creation & Idea Sharing: How to adapt your content and digital strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Learn more about this webinar.

Strategic Thinking In Uncertain Times

NOTE: Following the CoSIDA Listening and Leading webinar of April 14 on content creation, ideas and strategies, Shawn Medeiros of Endicott College shares insight, tips and thoughts on navigating responsibilities as SIDs through the COVID-19 pandemic. Medeiros wrote this piece a few days prior to serving as a presenter on the April 14th webinar.

by Shawn Medeiros – Endicott College, Sports Information Director/D3SIDA First Vice President  smedeiro@endicott.edu
Member of the CoSIDA Young Professionals and CoSIDA Mentorship committees 

First and foremost, I hope that you, your family, and friends are all healthy and safe at this time.

In a variety of ways, we have all been challenged professionally throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this article is to provide some insight, tips, and thoughts on my experiences — and some of my colleagues' experiences — on how we have navigated our responsibilities as sports information directors (SIDs)/athletic communication professionals at the NCAA Division II and III levels throughout the last month or so.

We hope that anyone reading this can translate something, anything really, from this breakdown into their own practices, whether it's a direct example or not.

Also, for the readers at home, if you have insight to add on any of these topics please do so by quote tweeting CoSIDA's post, tag @COSIDAnews, your colleagues, and our friends over at @SIDA_chat and @YPSportsChat to continue the conversation.

We can all learn from each other.

With that being said, let's jump into it.

OPTIMIZING YOUR WEBSITE

If we're going to start somewhere it might as well be here, right?

Over the last few weeks our team at Endicott College (myself, assistant SID, GA, and a few additions… we'll get to that later) has placed a huge emphasis on "what needs our attention right now" in regards to web pages on our website.

The main focus has been about two areas: pages that could be impacted by COVID-19 related information and admissions/recruiting information (more thoughts on admissions later too).

Some of the pages that we have updated with COVID-19 related information and admissions/recruiting information include our main landing page, recruit me page, sport-specific recruit me page(s)*, athletic training, strength & conditioning, and Why Endicott? pages.

* - please note our sport-specific page(s) work(s) as a fluid page without having to access, exit, and enter it/them from or into different pages. Rob Palardy, Endicott's former Assistant Athletic Director for Athletic Communications and current Executive Director of Marketing Integration at the College, spearheaded the design of our website's sport-specific pages, which have increased average session duration time and exit rates in comparison to the website's previous design. He also was the driving force behind the creation of the Why Endicott? And recruit me pages (main page & coach recruit me pages).

In regards to the main landing page, after leaving our athletics' COVID-19 announcement and our president's COVID-19 announcement pinned for roughly two weeks, we created a "Strength & Conditioning and Wellness Hub" for our student-athletes to access a one-stop-shop resource page to further enhance their mental and physical well-being through links and Google Excel Sheets that contain workouts, nutritional tips, motivational thoughts, and wellness support, in conjunction with our Counseling Center.

We then put that page on our athletic training and strength & conditioning pages and pushed it out on all of our social channels.

On the admissions/recruiting side, we made sure all of our coaches' bios were updated, added virtual visit, video tour, and first-year residence hall video tour links to all of their sport-specific recruit me pages — men's volleyball example — and encouraged all of our coaches to add those specific links into their email signatures. We also made sure all hyperlinks on every page mentioned so far in this article were not broken and linked out to appropriate, updated pages.

Some of these decisions were based on data we compiled through having Google Analytics set up on our website. Through a little research, we took a deeper dive into what pages were receiving the most traffic, what our new user versus returning user rate was, and encouraged everyone on our staff impacted by the data to take one more look at their respective pages.

Our goals were to have them make sure we covered all of our bases/offer up any suggestions about items we were missing that had the potential to be important to prospective students, current student-athletes, and family members of both of those groups.

Another strategic discussion we have had is to make our recruit me page, sport-specific recruit me page(s)*, athletic training, strength & conditioning, and Why Endicott? pages featured stories on our main landing page rotator. The thought would be to link out directly to those pages, however, we have not solidified our answer on that yet.

Eventually, news releases, our Senior Send-Off pieces, and feature stories could become scarce. Having those pages present on the main landing page of the website throughout the course of the next few months might prove to be a lot more beneficial to our college and universities and more than we think too.

SHOWCASING YOUR VALUE

For starters, our staff created a Google Doc that has helped us track what we have accomplished throughout each day so far during this experience. We started this back on Tuesday, March 17 and it has been beneficial to our staff for a variety of reasons.

The thought process behind this is to have the ability to showcase to anyone in our department and/or outside of our department what we are getting done and how long it is potentially taking us.

We also have put a rough estimate near each completed task on the time it takes to finish a project so that when we start diving into more academic features and expand our social media efforts later this month the evidence is there to advocate for ourselves and what it takes to do our job(s) properly and effectively.

Lastly, it has allowed us to track our goals and schedule out our content in a more efficient way.

Back to our staff for a quick second.

With certain staff members roles changing during our work at home order, we have incorporated our field hockey coach/marketing & promotions director and graduate assistant for intramurals/marketing & promotions assistant (former Endicott student-athlete) into all of our decision-making processes. Their overall insight into recruiting and social media has helped immensely in our messaging, execution, and creativity.

We'd highly recommend bringing more people into your circle(s) to help yourself out and to further showcase to them what you are doing.

Another area my colleagues and I have felt that's important throughout this situation has been over communicating. We certainly have more time on our hands than we are used to right now so with that free space we have decided to consistently update our athletic director, assistant/associate athletic directors, and coaches on many of the suggestions provided above.

Whether it be how we changed their recruiting pages, suggested adding links to their signatures, provided social media ideas, and/or asked for their help on what kind of resources their student-athletes would need from us, we haven't been in the background lately, as is the norm. And, quite frankly, it's been a nice change of pace for them to consistently see our impact in multiple areas across the board.

Secondly, reach out to your admissions office and see how you can help, either by making recruiting calls for them, or understanding further what kind of messaging they are using with prospective students. Those phone calls could also serve as a solid opportunity to let them know about any changes you've made to the website that impact their area. Or, even your recruiting efforts on social media for that matter (more thoughts on that later too).

How about your college communications office?

Think about how you can collaborate with them more or offer up your services in some capacity.

Maybe you can dive deeper into the promotion of specific events related to your college/university.

For us, we recently held a virtual Accepted Students Day. It was great to be able to have expanded conversations with their staff, and admissions too, about how we can help on our end more than we normally do, which is usually quite extensive.

What about polling your SAAC group (or student-athlete leadership group)?

You'd be surprised what kind of information they could offer up.

For instance, they might be able to help you produce some materials on the website/social media that student-athletes are looking for, or, more importantly, are in need of given the abruptness of this all that you may not think of because we are not in their shoes.

Your SAAC group also might be a good test populace to see if the tone, messaging, and delivery of your social posts are landing the way you want them to do so.

Furthermore, you might be able to serve as an extension of the staff and put them more at ease during these uncertain times by answering some of their questions too.

Being able to provide any of that feedback to your administrators could be vital in "showcasing your value" beyond sports information.

The more we can think outwardly, away from our traditional roles, the greater our presence is going to be felt.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Right now, more than ever, tone, messaging, and being on brand need to be at the forefront of everything we hit the publish button on.

Everything is heightened in these moments, especially when it comes to overall sensitivity.

As previously mentioned, pulling in two more colleagues from our department into our SID circle has helped more than we ever realized it would.

Those areas include photo choices, caption ideas, content ideas, when and where to post, and volume of posting. These different perspectives have shined a better light on our strategies and/or reinforced some we have already had in place.

We'd recommend creating a circle for yourself. The decision process right now is stressful so why not have someone else to lean on or to offer up some advice?

Case in point, think of jumping on trends or memes on social media. A few questions we like to ask ourselves to make sure it's appropriate are: 
  • How does it benefit us? 
  • Where does it position us from a brand/tone/messaging situation? 
  • Where does it fall in our overall content strategy plan?

Some other examples of how our process has worked for us are as follows.

To start, in particular, I am proud of the way we handled our decision process to go "dark" or "absent" on social media once all of our seasons were canceled to allow our student-athletes, staff, fans, etc. time to grieve. We felt that was the best decision for us as a department based on a myriad of reasons when we came together as a staff, but, mostly, it was that we didn't feel whatever we said during that time would be meaningful or powerful enough to warrant a post.

From there, we devised an action plan about how we would bounce back. This Instagram Post has now set the standard for how we will operate moving forward until this all clears up.

It has changed our decision making process in regards to the fact that all social posts need to be approved by the group of the five of us. This has maintained a greater level of consistency when it comes to our tone and messaging, for sure.

In the past, we have vetted most, but not all, posts through our original staff. However, the new perspectives in our group have created a deeper understanding of our brand, messaging, and tone.

Other thoughts we are discussing in our groups (Endicott & other SID communities) include: 
  • How do we prove to upper administration that we are being successful on social? (NOTE: If anyone wants to talk about social media analytics I'd be happy to do so. That's a whole other topic within itself.)
  • How do we highlight our academic programs in a non-forced/organic way right now?
  • How do we continue to promote virtual mental health services?
  • What kind of stories are we pitching to local media outlets/NCAA/etc.?
  • What's the right balance between being funny or not funny and/or just being informational?
  • We really should be thinking about content that focuses more on human feelings and interactions. How do we do this?
  • Expressing more gratitude than we normally do? What's that look like for us?
  • Listen, listen, listen. We now have the time to do more social listening. What's our plan for this? How does it differ from what we have done in the past?
The point being, don't take on everything yourself right now if you don't have to do so. We need to worry about our mental health too, and for us, these working groups (internal/external) have been a huge help, now more than ever.

We also need to take this time to question our "why" a lot more than we do. We have the time to critically think about our strategies, our goals, what purpose we serve, and how we truly help recruiting, retention, and the admissions department as a whole. Our landscapes are different from most schools, whether you break it down by division or not. This is a prime time to really hone in on what separates your college/university from others and run with it. Make that your own.

At Endicott, in particular, our efforts are focused on the holistic experience of the student-athlete. That means promoting their efforts on their respective competition surfaces, the classroom, their internship experiences, study abroad opportunities, community service, and outcomes.

Maybe sparking up those conversations with other colleagues/coaches/admissions staff will get your brain moving in the thought processes mentioned above. Or, maybe it will allow you to be more creative with fan-engagement type social posts.

Whatever the case may be, we have this time to further develop ourselves through collaboration with our colleagues, truthfully our professional teammates and families and that sounds even more exhilarating as I type it out.

For example, here's some content I want to share from our colleagues that I've particularly liked. After seeing their posts, I've reached out and/or plan to ask about their thought process, execution of the project, and so on, since we have a lot more time.

Another thing to consider before we get to the content pieces is doing a bi-weekly brush through of college/university academic and athletic content/social media channels. It will progress your decision-making process and keep your brain fresh during all of this. We are incorporating this process into our weekly SID staff meetings to see what we all like and equally as important don't like.

Some social media posts/ideas and/or overall content I've liked (for various reasons):
  • Thank You piece — Good for recruiting, shareable across team channels depending on how an SID would deliver the content pieces as single, actionable items.
  • The Season That Wasn't — An in-depth Adobe Spark recap/timeline of the current COVID-19 experience from many perspectives.
  • St. Michael's Instagram Story crowdsourcing initiative which asked their student-athletes exactly what they wanted to see over the coming months. It was early during COVID-19, but the tone and messaging made sense given the student-athletes' feedback. The account also shared as much as possible content that was requested of them during that time on IG Story, which made its student-athletes feel connected, even for a brief time, with many of their friends, coaches and teammates.
  • Elmira Thank You Seniors on Instagram — Well branded, provides relevant information about the student-athlete and their major. Graphics are exceptional.
  • Maranatha Baptist University — Overall tone, messaging, and content mix.
  • Messiah College — After the Whistle series is a solid use of user generated content that's curated well.
  • Norwich Cadets Instagram — Overall tone, messaging, and content strategy.
  • Bethel Royals Recruiting Page — This recruiting hub is a one-stop-shop for everything Bethel Royals in terms of recruiting. The imagery is powerful and beautiful and the language is perfectly chosen and articulates the brand well.

FINAL THOUGHTS / ACTION PLAN

One could argue that we have the broadest audience of any social media platform at every school we work at — more than the general college/university one — and you could argue that people have a deeper connection with our website/social media accounts in comparison to the college/university website.

Therefore, we have to push for a seat at the table at the highest level of strategic thinking in the department and our college/university as our ability to execute these strategic initiatives will frame how people see the school at large.

What we do can help answer questions students, parents, and prospective students have:
  • "Is this a caring community?" 
  • "What does the college/university care about?" 
  • "What do students think of the people (coaches and/or professors) at our college/university?" 
  • "Would I want to go here?" 
  • "Can I trust these people with my money?"

Now, more than ever, we have an opportunity to insert ourselves in these discussions and create better dialogue on our platforms to further promote these areas with a positive emphasis.

This will also allow administrators and colleagues across campus to see how we can connect to everyone and create an essential narrative about our school (or conference).

Lastly, before I "sign-off" you can find the phases of the action plan our SID staff sent to our athletic administration to showcase our accountability. I saved this for last because it sums up some of the important content previously mentioned but also displays future ideas. Please remember that everything within this article is fluid and subject to change at any time.

Thanks for your time.

Take care and stay safe,

Shawn Medeiros (and a whole lot of other SID colleagues who contributed to this project)

Informational Phase (March 12 - April 7)

  • Publicized all relevant COVID-19 info via all of our channels (website, email, social)
  • Items included in that plan were a general COVID-19 release, the College's COVID-19 release, a personal message from our AD, CCC statement from our conference, NCAA statement, NCAA open letter to NCAA student-athletes, an Accepted Students Day message from our AD, and any additional updates from the College
  • General athletic press releases were put on hold until three-to-five days after the original COVID-19 messaging was sent out
  • Social media went "dark" or "absent" for three-to-five days to allow information to be at the forefront of what we had produced online
  • Update all relevant admissions/recruiting info on website including our main landing page, recruit me page, sport-specific recruit me page(s)*, athletic training, strength & conditioning, and Why Endicott? pages.
Resource Phase (April 6 - When Not Needed)*
  • Created an Endicott Strength & Conditioning and Wellness Hub page for our student-athletes to access a one-stop-shop resource page to further enhance their mental and physical well-being through links and Google Excel Sheets that contain workouts, nutritional tips, motivational thoughts, and wellness support, in conjunction with our Counseling Center. (this page will be updated weekly with new content)
* = Future plans include the following items: 
  • Feature article incorporating deans, professors, and student-athletes discussing their overall experiences with online learning
  • Feature articles that supply tips and tricks for online learning from a S-A perspective 
  • Feature articles that supply tips and tricks for staying in shape from a S-A perspective
  • Potential professor takeovers on IG story
  • Feature article on what our teams have accomplished on their zoom calls w/ quotes
(All plans mentioned above will be translated into social media, appropriately)

Outcome Phase (Late April - May/June/July)
  • Contact coaches to see if any of their student-athletes are landing jobs during this crisis
  • Repurpose student-athlete features that have showcased our prior outcomes
  • Work with internship and career center to see if they have any literature to share
  • Work with admissions to see if they have any literature to share
Other Actionable Items
  • Will continue to share any items previously discussed until we return to normalcy
  • Will jump on any relevant social media content, when applicable
  • Continue looking for ways to promote our student-athletes' successes in the following areas: their respective competition surfaces, the classroom, their internship experiences, study abroad opportunities, community service, and outcomes