This is a thread for NickM. We need to get some good ideas in the hands of our marketing department. I will post some of mine when I get a chance, but if you have any good ideas post them here. Thanks Nick.

Wristbands
Cookouts (ones done correctly)
Give aways
....Stress balls
....tshirts
Greek involvement
Striped Crew promotions
Weekly(?) Email Newsletter (from StripedCrew.com or KSUOwls.com, either one)

Summer Freshmen seminars:
Promotional items, packet, sign up, advertising, banners, merchandise selling, socks, tshirts

That should get the ball rolling. What worked, what didn't in your opinion?

I wasn't able to attend many home games this year, so I wouldnt have a good grasp on your post, but here are some thoughts. The key to attendance is motivation. What motivates a person to spend 2-3 hours paying money to watch some athletic guys run up and down the court. In my mind it is attending the game with people you know and sharing the experience. None of the things that the marketing department is doing right now it really accomplishing that. We should be reaching out to churches...especially men's groups and offering them special packages. Offer them a package deal of hotdogs, popcorn, and drink plus a game ticket for a reduced price - and put a minimum number of people that must attend.

Example approach 'Church A' - attendance of 800 people and have a solid men's attendance of 200. Try to get 20-30 of them to come to a game with this sort of package. There are hundreds of churches around Kennesaw that would love to do a men's night out at a Kennesaw Basketball game. You could make the whole package for $10 a ticket. Kennesaw has to get people in the gate, not just offer them free stuff once they are already there. That is where the marketing department fails. Mobilizing people is hard work. Ordering some tshirts and throwing them out at games is easy.

We need to be calling church groups, recreational basketball leagues, soccer leagues, any sort of organization that would have a possible interest in watching a game. Offer them some sort of package deal that would incentify them attending the game, and watch the results. THEN you do the giveaways. But giving away things to people who already attend the games on a regular basis is silly.

Youth Groups would be another idea. Maybe a father / son night with a church...you see what I am talking about. I think we have a program that most decent people would identify with. Ingle runs a clean ship, and puts out an exciting product, we just have to convince the people of Northwest Atlanta (around 1 million of them) that driving out to a Kennesaw game is more fun than turning on their Flatscreen and watching ESPN HD Game of the Week. That is not always the easiest thing to do...

Hopefully that made sense.

Outside promotions and marketing is definately an area of concern. I like the idea of the churches. There's a lot of great high school basketball teams that would be a double benefit. The problem lies in that we cannot give any 'potential recruit' ANYTHING in accordance with NCAA. That means free tickets, an invite to the VIP booth, a game ball signed by our stars and potential recruit is so broadly defined (on purpose) that it makes giving advantages to HS teams almost an impossibility. What would make high schoolers more apt to come to a game they have to spend money for?

I'm a lot more concerned about the students living on campus and in the neighboring communities that have a vested interest in the school and program. I think targeting them to "follow" the team instead of attending games would be much more beneficial. Things like newsletters, updates in the Sentinel, local media coverage makes that easier and more likely to inform. This site is also a great tool. Maybe we can get a skin on Kennesaw's board and link directly from StripedCrew.com or even ksuowls.com. I could talk with Georgia Tech Swagger about it. I'm sure he'd be fine with it.

Local is relative....and you can have recruits come to the games all the time. I am not sure on this, but I don't believe it is a recruiting violation to give a high school athlete a free pass into the game...I think that is what they deem an unofficial visit. Not sure on that. But that falls more into the recruiting aspect. I am talking about putting butts into the seats. Students will come once Kennesaw starts winning - that is just the way students are. If it is the cool thing to do then they will do it...winning is the best thing that can be done for the students.

Winning is something that is out of the marketing departments control. What is in control is that the students know about the team, players, games and how the season is going good or bad.

I agree :) My point is that the marketing department needs to let the Striped Crew handle students...that is what they were created for, and the Marketing department needs to handle the community.

Gotcha, well right now SC is working alongside the athletic department to get a plan together.

As far as other things marketing could improve on is merchandising, licensing, brand recognition (Owl head), outdoor advertising. Budgets are tight so ideas have to be off the cuff or a large ROI. All those things are considered I assure you.

A new thing is that organizations are "sponsoring" a team. I'm not up to date on this but I know it's been a goal to get more student leaders involved and bringing in some of the 200+ RSO's all with leaders of their own is a goal of the athletic department.

I feel your pain. It appears that ETSU attendance has fallen from around 5k per game (SoCon days) to around 3k per game now.

ETSU just lacks any rivalries in the A-Sun. Folks in the ETSU athletic department may see rivalries, but Joe fan doesn't see one, Joe fan doesn't even know where most of the A-Sun schools are. I may be a pessimist, but I am not convinced that ETSU can build fan support while playing in the ASun.

Our "rivalry" was UNF... umm, yeah.

It will take a while for ETSU to build fan support because no one knows who these teams are. To be honest...Kennesaw is your best bet, because we already piss off your entire fan base. I could be wrong, but I could see our games becoming epic battles over the coming years if both programs progress like I think they will. I think that ETSU will be our in conference rivalry eventually, and I would love to see something started with Georgia State if at all possible.

Bringing this back to the front! Let's see what ideas we can generate to get things rolling!