At the University of Nebraska Lincoln, we may notice that the attendance to women’s basketball, softball, gymnastics, and baseball is far below where it needs to be. When looking at the statistics, our women’s basketball team has been in the top 25 in recent years. Husker baseball is on the rise, Gymnastics is exciting, Soccer has a beautiful new stadium with a BIG 10 championship caliber team, and a high powered softball team who brings nothing but consistency. Still for some reason we’re still unable to fill the stands. Athletic departments all across the world have been facing this battle for years and have tried countless ways to make attendance numbers rise. Personally, since I can remember during my time at UNL, the sports that I’ve mentioned were all free to attend with a valid student ID. On top of that, the odds are a student with be given something free for simply walking in the door. In all honesty, a free T-shirt isn’t going to do the trick and neither is coupon to get a free popcorn. These are all things that athletic departments in the past have considered to be appealing but now there’s an opportunity for change.
To increase the amount of people to attend these events the University of Nebraska Lincoln with offer points to students that will be put towards your N Card. So, if a person decides to go to a Husker Soccer game, they will receive a certain amount of points. Once you have a desired amount of points, you can use them as credit towards campus related businesses or simply the bookstore apparel. Some off campus discounts could go towards campus sponsored clothing companies or close but yet off campus businesses. This could possibly draw quite the crowd.
This has the opportunity to cause an uproar in earned media due to its versatility and relevance to all students. Students who want to earn points to earn credit at Runza for example, will have to attend a Soccer, Softball, etc, game to be able to possess these rewards. This single handedly will run students right into these low attendance sporting events creating earned media. This would be downloaded from the app store which would cause students to spread earned media through word of mouth.
-Jack Davis
oepediadotcom 