NIL through SEO: TigerImpact's marketing for Clemson collective

There’s a seemingly endless number of questions about NIL collectives, regarding their various filing statuses and how they operate. If you go searching for answers, literally, then you might stumble across an ad for the Clemson-focused collective TigerImpact at the top of your Google search results.

NIL, meet SEO.

“We develop student athletes to positively impact others through community charities,” reads the description below the advertisement for TigerImpact. “A purpose-driven NIL collective.”

You might see the ad after searching for “NIL collectives,” “Clemson NIL Club” or TigerImpact itself.

Positive Impact Fund for Tiger Charities, LLC, is a 501(c)(3) organization that established TigerImpact this year. TigerImpact is one of several organizations or groups designed to support Clemson athletes through NIL, along with Dear Old Clemson and Palmetto Cat Crew, a subsidiary of The Players’ Lounge.

TigerImpact has raised more than $5.5 million, according to co-founder and board member Kevin Gemas, who was a member of Clemson’s 1981 national championship football team. Executive Director Bobby Couch was previously a senior associate director at IPTAY, the Clemson fundraising organization whose acronym stands for “I pay ten a year.”

“We don’t know exactly, at this point, specifically how much we’re going to need to raise,” Gemas told On3. “We have a good idea, and we have a road map to get us to that range. But we are trying to do our very best to be able to cover all 524 student-athletes and over 20 sports at Clemson at this point in some capacity if they would like to participate in a charity.”

Clemson running back Will Shipley recently donated $10,000 from his NIL earnings to the Charlotte-based Levine Children’s Hospital. Men’s soccer player Isaiah Reed has similarly donated to the Boys & Girls Clubs of York County, according to Gemas.

‘Match.com or Tinder for charities and student-athletes’

In Gemas’ words, one of TigerImpact’s tenets is education.

“The bottom line on that is really what we’re trying to do is just take the approach to educate donors and reach out in as many different channels as possible,” he said. “We’re in the mode to educate a lot of the people. As you can appreciate, the NIL space is just wide open.”

Google is one of the channels that helps expand the reach of TigerImpact’s marketing funnel. When asked about the ad buys, Gemas credited TigerImpact’s IT manager James Grams. Gemas joked about his technological blindspots but he said thanks to Grams, the collective can track its engagement from different sources and marketing efforts.

“It’s very important to us because then we can see what’s working, what’s not, how we can tweak the ads and any other channels that we go through to be more proactive in certain areas than others,” Gemas said.

Gemas said that TigerImpact doesn’t even solicit current Clemson athletes. Google ads could theoretically even act as a passive recruitment mechanism for athletes, in addition to donors.

Athletes have to reach out to the collective first. They must register through a portal and answer a variety of questions. That information is then fed into a proprietary algorithm that includes a variety of factors, such as sport, position, social media following, a star rating and behavior, in order to match each athlete with a charity. The algorithm also calculates each athlete’s market value.

“We’re kind of like, in one sense, a Match.com or Tinder for charities and student-athletes,” Gemas said, laughing.

In South Carolina, the state law regarding NIL was suspended effective July 1 for the 2022-23 fiscal year.

“Since July 1… absolutely, there’s been a lot more openness, correspondence back and forth with the university’s department and personnel, coaches and such, so that’s helped a great deal,” Gemas said. “It helped give us some direction as far as sports and players that we should try to concentrate our efforts on a little bit and helping those that want to be helped.”

‘There’s no, per se, concerns’ regarding nonprofits

While Gemas acknowledged TigerImpact’s interactions with Clemson athletes, donors and charities are “highly confidential,” the collective’s co-founders’ education efforts extend to other fan bases, not just their own.

In Gemas’ words, TigerImpact’s co-founders don’t want to have a bad apple in the bunch in terms of other collectives.

“Quite frankly, we’ve gotten a number of calls from different universities wanting to model TigerImpact and try to implement that into their collectives and their schools, and that’s the number one question: ‘How do you go about it?'” Gemas said. “How do you do it the right way and make sure that no one else is going to have any problems with it? Because it could reflect on the industry if there are some collectives out there and they don’t do it properly and it reflects on all of us. We don’t want that to happen.

“We’re going to try to take even more of a national presence to help those colleges or those other collectives set it up like we do and set it up the right way.”

Gemas said TigerImpact’s co-founders don’t have any concerns about the future of NIL collectives that are registered as nonprofit organizations, either due to the IRS taking a closer look at their filing status or because their finances will be made public after tax season.

“There’s no, per se, concerns on our end because we know we’ve set it up properly,” Gemas said. “We’ve contracted some very prominent attorneys who are well-versed in setting up and executing with nonprofits so we feel very comfortable with that. Honestly, myself, Richard Davies, Kendall Alley, we are not taking any kind of income. This is totally volunteer. We put our names out there so we personally do not want our names associated with anything that could be misconstrued as not doing the right things. We are on top of that. We are making sure it is carried out fully. We’re not only complying with federal and state regulations but we are also complying with what guidelines there are out there with the NCAA. We set this up to do just that.

“We have a management system behind the scenes that allows us and keeps up between the sidelines. It won’t allow us to go outside of the sidelines and do anything that would cause a problem.”