Thank you Andrea Obston for inviting me, Riley Hicks & Andrew Girard to watch your Quinnipiac University Sports PR class presentations, where each group spent their semester long project researching Hartford Yard Goats Baseball and creating a marketing plan! It’s always eye-opening to hear from the perspectives of marketing students on how they view our ballpark, branding & social media platforms!
Last year, Mike Abamson (my boss and General Manager of the Hartford Yard Goats) invited me to be on a panel with him at Quinnipiac for a sports marketing class. This year, the Quinnipiac professor reached out to me to see if the class could come to Dunkin’ Donuts Park and do their semester long project on the Hartford Yard Goats.
They came in, toured, and asked many questions. As Covid-19 approached, and the plans changed, the class presented their projects via Zoom.
Here are a few things I noticed:
- Students were reading directly of the screen because, well they could! This allowed the students to limit on sharing more in depth on what they actually learned, and just focus more on writing a response/presentation that they could just read word for word.
- I was much more critical than I normally would be since I was alone, sitting in a quiet room, fully focused on the presentation.
- The word “you guys” was used a lot instead of “the Yard Goats” … which has nothing to do with the fact that the presentation was virtual, but just that that was a frequent filler word.
Here’s a few suggested things that came up in the presentations for the Yard Goats to improve on, and here are my answers:
“Put your website in your bio on Instagram so people can be redirected there always.”
A: Our website isn’t always the best place to direct people at certain times. A lot of the time on instagram, we’ll use a “LINK IN BIO” caption, so people can click the updated link depending on what the post is. No user wants to do additional work or type anything extra to get to a place you’re trying to get them to go. The goal is make it as easy as possible for them.
“Make sure you make Facebook event pages for all of your games and other events”
A: We created all of the Facebook event pages, titles, and descriptions prior to our promotional calendar releasing in February. With that, people are able to hit going or interested so that they will get updates not only on the game, but any other special details that they may learn to prepare for the game. Now, we’re slowly deleting them as each homestead continues to get postponed.
Danielle Chylinski 