Kleinlein Excited About Direction of GS Athletics
6/28/2017 2:11:00 PM | General
The fourth in a five-part Q&A session with Georgia Southern AD Tom Kleinlein
PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
Q: The Athletic Foundation continues to evolve and add new levels to attract new donors. What is your general feeling of all those changes?
TK: The one change that I really like right now is that we're trying to approach our foundation from a numbers standpoint. Again, we continue to build as we finish up the fifth year here as a staff. When I got here, we knew how many donors we had, but our systems of who they were, where they were located were very antiquated. We're now building a system where our athletic foundation and our university foundation talk and there are a lot of collaborative efforts there as we share data and information. We're beginning with a philosophy of building numbers rather than through significant contributions. Don't get me wrong, we'll always take significant contributions, but we need to start building our numbers so we can establish generations of donors. We need to start getting to the younger fans who are just starting out of college and that's where the new True Blue 120 comes into play. It's really allowed us to go out and get some younger donors for just $120 a year. That money significantly impacts the student-athletes because it goes straight to scholarships. It's not going to a project or facility or paying a salary, it's going straight to scholarships, which I think resonates with everybody because our student-athletes become alums of the athletic department, but also alums of the business program, the construction management program, the school of education, the sports management program and so on. So people who have those degrees share that commonality with our student-athletes. I think sometimes we look at what they did on the field and we forget that they're an alumni from a particular college and they are a part of that as much as they are of our sports. So we're trying to reach out to the 80,000-plus alums we have who are alums of those various colleges and try to get them to realize that if they support our student-athletes by donating $120 dollars, they're supporting their colleges and programs as well.
Q: Georgia Southern is still pretty young in terms of both the age of the school and football program, thus the alumni base is pretty young. What can be done to get them to donate and buy season tickets?
TK: It's contacting these new alumni right when they get out of college, or in some cases, starting while they're in college. We've got to continue to look at how we do events. Obviously, the Atlanta area is a huge market for us so a recruitment event done in Atlanta is done differently than one in Statesboro. We've got to look at different ways to do events to recruits people in different locations. I think you're starting to see more events around games and watch parties and such. These are all things that the younger groups of alumni seem to gravitate to. We've got to continue to improve our social media presence and we've got to improve the way we recruit our alumni through their phones. However you want to look at it, that's how people communicate now so we have to be better at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the other social media platforms out there now or ones that will pop up in the future. These are all mechanisms that the staff in the foundation and ticketing office have to use to reach out and get the word out about Georgia Southern Athletics. Our younger groups seem to be event driven. If you put on an event, they seem to come so we have to put on more events, whether it's at a Braves game or a football game or around something else. One of the advantages of playing in the Sun Belt is that we have an intra-conference rival that we're going to play up in Atlanta six or seven times a year in different sports. Doing those events around those games is something we have to do to attract more people.
Q: Tuition is going up every year, which means you're going to have to raise more money every year. Is this a long-term issue?
TK: The necessity for us to raise money is never going to stop. That's why it's so important that we grow our fan base. We're going to get to a point where if our fan base stops growing, I'm going to still have to come up with the money for scholarships. The more we grow our fan and donor bases, the more we recruit younger donors, the more our current donors recruit other donors, the less I have to "tax" our current fans for lack of a better word. At some point, I've got to provide the revenue because we have to make a $4.8 million dollar payment to cover the cost of scholarships every year and I've got to continue to pay coaches and pay other bills. It's the constant battle of growing numbers and revenue so that we don't have to "tax" our current donors and fans. But if we don't grow numbers and revenue, I've got to come up with that money somehow and that means raising prices on tickets, parking and donations. That's also why the Learfield, the Coca-Cola and adidas deals are so important because that helps keeps the cost of watching the Eagles play down.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 5: Wednesday, July 5
