Can the athletic department even set this up? I thought NIL had to be arms length from the university. Can Bryan Blair be involved in this? How much of a role can the athletic department take if any at all.
The school can actually be more involved now with NIL given recent law changes, but the involvement is still somewhat limited.
But that said, it seems the school made a decision to not to get involved perhaps under the view that NIL is a funding competitor for Annual Giving Day?
That view is bass-ackwards, as NIL is a separate, necessary component and is now a huge component of every successful football and basketball program.
Moreover, I think they really need to actively support both (NIL and direct school donations) to the best of their ability, with the realization that:
- NIL support should be targeted to all fans and supporters - whales, casuals, die hards, alums, non-alums, etc.
- Annual Giving Day is really for an alumni-only target demo
We should be able to walk and chew gum and support both well.
What does the school effectively supporting NIL look like?
Goal: Make NIL promotion and donation prolific, effective, and easy, regardless of which collective is doing it. Standardize the effective methods for this and get all collectives rowing in unison together with effective platforms to garner the most amount of donations.
- NIL Website and Donor Platform: School develops a purpose-designed donor website and platform that effectively and efficiently takes NIL donations, supports NIL promotions, easy checkout options (CC, Paypal/Venmo, ACH, Zelle, ApplePay, GooglePay, etc.) and supports subscriptions (monthly, quarterly, and annual auto-renewals, etc.
- NIL Donor App: A sister iOS and Android app that does the same as the website and runs of the same base platform and DB as the website using responsive codeset.
- Standardized, Licensable & Skinable: Both web platform and app could be licensed to a collective (football collective, men's bball collective, women's bball collective, etc.) for a nominal fee (say $1 a year) and the platform would be fully skinable so each collective can style it to their own collective brand and use CMS to modularly customize it. A standardized offering that works... If it works really well, license it for a lot more than $1 year to other schools' collectives (new revenue stream)
- Promotional Schedule & Social Advertising: Work with each collective to establish target canvas promotional timeframes during the year to really push for NIL donations and support those efforts with targeted social media advertising and getting the "Donate Now" message in front of our fanbase with easy click--to-donate or tap-to-donate ads that are effective
- Partner with the RIGHT digital development firms and social ad agencies to provide the deliverables above and updates and change them when necessary.
Anyways, an approach with big ideas... Gonna need a good consultant group to drive this development and spend some real money to do it right.
I expect Blair will be coming up with some type of approach like this that will increase the school's involvement and control over NIL by working more closely with the collectives. Provide them with business tools and donation strategy that works efficiently and help standardize an ongoing approach maximizing donation opportunities while taking more control of how the funding is done and when.
