Q&A: How schools use analytics to understand spending habits, preferences of fans

As executive vice president, collegiate athletics for the data collection and management platform SSB, Steve Hank has had an up-close view of the monumental stress test that college athletic departments have endured the past two years.

SSB enables sports organizations to analyze ticket sales, attendance, fundraising and merchandise sales to boost revenues and enhance engagement with customers. Well more than half of all Power 5 athletic departments are clients, as well as dozens of teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB.

On3 recently caught up with Hank, who also spent 14 years in college sports as chief revenue officer at Texas and as associate athletic director at Arizona State, to talk about how quickly Power 5 schools on the business side have embraced data and analytics, which offer valuable insights into the spending habits and preferences of their fan bases. Hanks said the need to understand who your fans are never has been more important, especially as athletic departments face fierce headwinds from the COVID-19 pandemic and what he termed an unprecedented level of uncertainty. The need to tap into new sources of revenue never has been greater. Because of that, he said, the ability for schools to personalize how they communicate with fans is no longer optional; rather, it’s essential.

The interview has been slightly edited for context and clarity.

Q: Why does it benefit schools to work with SSB?

Hank: We’re talking about collegiate athletic departments in universities, where you have all this information that sits in your ticketing system. You have the information about them [fans] that sits in their merchandise system. You have information in the concession system and their donor management system, in your email marketing system, how many emails are they opening. And each one of those systems by themselves is useful and provides a small view into the customer. But what you really want to do is collect all of that information into one centralized database so you have a complete understanding about that customer. So you don’t just know that Tom Jones sits in Section 7, seats 1 through 4. You know that Tom Jones sits in section 7, seats 1 through 4, buys extra-large T-shirts from the merchandise shop along with baseball caps, opens your insider newsletter on average two out of every three times, donates at the university to the School of Education in addition to the annual fund for the athletic department. Now you have a holistic picture as to the actions that Tom has. There’s three types of information you have on people. You have the information that people communicate, the things they tell you. The second type of information is actions and behaviors that people take, things that they do, the process of purchasing a ticket. And the third type of information is maybe somebody’s salary, or their marital status, or if they have 2.2 kids, the BMW and the family dog, that type of information. Each one of those information types by itself is useful. But when it really becomes powerful and actionable is when you collect all of that information into one spot. The core of what we do is folded into two things: Number one, we give a near-real time view for executives into the exact health of their business. Number two, we give a comprehensive view of the constituents for every single organization, so you can meet their needs.

Q: At the pro sports level, plenty of franchises have talked to me about the need to break down “silos” within an organization so that everyone on the business side can have access to the same valuable fan-focused data to then identify insights and make changes. Is that a pain point at the college level?

Hank: Universities are having to be more entrepreneurial and start functioning to provide better services to their students. You see it in the types of cafeterias that they’re building and the dorms and the housing. There is a shift and a mindset change. And with that, the cooperation and moving to a service culture has been something, quite frankly, we’re seeing that at our institutions. … We don’t work only with the athletic department; you also work with the advancement office, you work with different units across campus, the alumni association, and all the places that manage and touch constituents. They’re starting to come together, realizing it has to be a holistic message.

Q: At this stage in the pandemic, what are you hearing from athletic departments?

Hank: There was a lot of budget hesitancy for people across the country. I know several athletic departments that said they were on a spending freeze until they got halfway through the football season. There was an uncertainty of, “Hey, we’re starting to play in front of crowds. But if something pops up in the middle of the season, and we can’t get through football and we have to refund the last three home games of the year …” –after the financial hit that these departments took the year before, it would have been very, very difficult for them to ride through on that. Obviously with football being the lion’s share of the revenue at most institutions, there’s actually a kind of a collective sigh of relief that is coming through. … But it’s not just COVID. College athletics right now is probably dealing with uncertainty at a level that it has never dealt with, all at the same time. I mean, it is dealing with the constitutional issues of the NCAA, COVID, NIL, the new transfer portal regulations, realignment that is occurring on a high scale. And what we’re finding in athletic departments is, for the last 12 to 24 months, things haven’t been very stable. It is very hard for people to sometimes focus because of all of the things that just seem to be hitting people as we go through this period of uncertainty. Hopefully, after we get some answers on each one of these issues, as more clarity and certainty comes, I think the market will stabilize a little better.

Q: Beginning in March 2020, athletic departments needed to figure out how to keep fans engaged even though they didn’t have the ability to attend games for a period of time. Now that sports is back, how much of a priority is on knowing as much as possible about the habits of your fans and figuring out ways to maintain that engagement and enhance it?

Hank: It is absolutely essential, and not just because of the pandemic. I believe the floor for pay television households is now 53 million. We are seeing a massive change and a shift. Notre Dame is a great example. Remember they took their Toledo football game and put it on [NBC streaming service] Peacock only. When all the money comes from cable companies to your television rights contract, the relationship with the customer is held at the cable company level. You’re paying the subscription fee to Charter or Spectrum or DirectTV. They are paying that monthly fee to ESPN, and ESPN is writing you a rights check. That relationship with that customer is held by DirectTV or the cable company. In streaming, a lot of it is one-to-one communication that is occurring from the outsourced client. Notre Dame was sending information out to its constituents to get them to sign up for Peacock so that people could watch it. And depending upon where the streaming rights is headed, the understanding of your fan base at the individual constituent level is [critical] because the streaming relationship is one to one. It’s not aggregated like a cable company. So it’s having that deep understanding of your fan, but more importantly, understanding what their needs are. The other big change, and this is one of the biggest massive shifts that has occurred, when I was at Arizona State, the average season-ticket holder account had 3.4 tickets per account. The only person that 15 years ago we knew was the person whose name was on the season ticket holder account. You didn’t know the other three people that were coming. What COVID has accelerated, because everybody wants a digital ticket, now you know that if you have four tickets for each game the entire season, and you have six home games, that’s 24 opportunities. On average, there’s usually between 15 and 17 different people sitting in those 24 seats. Now you understand who those people are. You can have a dialogue with them. And you can match it up and say, “Hey, oh, they’re also purchasing tickets from the fan shop. Oh, they’re opening emails, or they’re spending this amount of time on the website.” So you understand who those constituents are, and the universe is absolutely exploding.

Q: With the pandemic front and center, have you ever seen a period of time where the need for athletic departments to identify and tap into new revenue streams has been this pronounced?

Hank: No, absolutely not. To develop new revenue streams, to maximize the revenue streams that they have, and understand and meet the needs of the customer — they have to develop and build those moments of truth. They have to do it by building relationships one on one. You can do that in automated ways, but it’s delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. And you can do that in an automated way by developing personas and communicating to persona groups so that it resonates. The message to a young alumni group is very, very different than a message to somebody who may not have gone to the institution but has been buying tickets and is just a fan of the community and supports the program because of that. Those people are sometimes just as actively engaged.

Q: When it comes to understanding and embracing the value of data and analytics — and what it means for understanding your fan — how large is the sophistication gap at the Power 5 level?

Hank: When I was at Arizona State, I actually hired SSB. I was the first one in collegiate athletics. We first signed with SSB in 2012. At the time, I’d go out and have conversations and people would look at me like I had four heads. Today, it has come down to, “I know we want to do it. We need to do it. But it’s not number one on my priority list.” That is at some institutions. There is not a single institution that today does not understand the importance. It is their ability to execute at this point. A lot of them are just reeling from the last year, between furloughs and people that were laid off. … There was no sense of normal in an athletic department for the last [20] months. And that’s what I think was really important, to get through this season. While it wasn’t normal, it was a heck of a lot closer to normal than it was in 2020. And so they’re starting to be able to focus and see great strategies that they need to execute on. They understand the importance and the relevance. 

Q: As we enter 2022, what’s the biggest top-of-mind issue for you in data and analytics when it comes to college athletics?

Hank: It’s really the importance of cutting through the chaff with relevant communication. We all know that collegiate and professional sports compared to many other businesses many times is behind the curve in terms of sophistication. You look at what Amazon is doing. I go on Amazon and look at the recommendations. I’m like, “How do these people know that I even want this?” We’ve entered the era of personalization. … It used to be that when you set out [ticket] renewals, you would send out one blanket renewal with a letter and an invoice. Now you need to personalize. I graduated from Notre Dame. Lou Holtz was my head coach. Now they will send me stuff that has pictures of Lou Holtz, and then can also send things to somebody who went to school during [a more recent] period a picture of Brian Kelly. We are entering the era of personalization. As consumers, we’re actually coming to expect it. The period of being impersonal is over. And if you don’t start providing the right message to the right person at the right time, you’re dead. In order to do that, you have to be able to understand them. And to be able to understand them, you have to know who they are. And you have all of that information in all of those siloed systems. Once you aggregate it into one place, you can understand who they are and communicate to them in a relevant way. It applies to ticket sales, to merchandise purchases, to every interaction that you have with that individual. Then they feel like they’ve been catered to.