SPEAKER_01
You're listening to the Higher Ed Marketer, a podcast geared towards marketing professionals in higher education. This show will tackle all sorts of questions related to student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and so much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where the industry is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_00
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. I'm Troy Singer, along with Bart Kaler. This week, the conversation is marketing and utilizing athletics for stronger enrollment.

I know this is something that Bart feels strongly about. Today, we speak with Jim Carr, who's the president and CEO of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, also known as NAIA. Bart, I think he gives us a lot of tips and a lot of information that some colleges are probably not thinking on how to utilize athletics to grow their enrollment and also to hone in on mission fit students.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. I think you're exactly right on that, Troy. The thing I like about the conversation we have with Jim today is NAIA is focused on kind of that small college athletic group.

Most of their members are, I think Jim says, around 1,800 students. I know that small schools rely a lot on recruitment of athletes for the overall class fit to get in there. Jim talks a little bit about how NAIA is supporting their member schools with data, with resources, and with ways of looking at athletics a little bit differently and helping the schools do that successfully.

I think there's a lot of good tips and tricks. If you've already got an athletic program in your school on how you might be able to tweak some things to get better marketing and better engagement between recruiters and coaches. But overall, I just really like Jim's approach to everything and the way that they kind of do things at NAIA.

SPEAKER_00
Here's our conversation with Jim Carr. We welcome Jim Carr to the conversation who is the CEO and president of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, otherwise known as NAIA to the Higher Ed Marketing Podcast. Jim, if you could, please introduce us to you and also the NAIA.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, thanks, Troy. Jim Carr, your president of NAIA, I've been in that position since 2006. I've been around for a while.

NAIA is a membership association made up of roughly 250 colleges and universities across the country, primarily in the Midwest, Southeast, and out West. And our membership is made up of about 80% private institutions. And those institutions, on average, have about 1,800 to 2,000 students.

Really, count on athletics to be a big driver of enrollment and just a big part of the campus. So we're there to support them in all their efforts, especially to run championships and make sure that student athletes on those campuses are eligible to compete.

SPEAKER_00
Thank you. And the reason why we asked you to be on the show is to get tips for our listeners on how athletics can be used to strengthen or increase enrollment. And that's a conversation that I believe you have on an ongoing basis with the presidents and leaders in the schools that are members of NAIA.

Is that correct?

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, we do. And it's a conversation that has grown with frequency and importance, I think, over the last decade or so. It used to be something that wasn't talked about nearly as much in terms of the impact that athletes can have on enrollment.

But I think schools and leaders of those institutions in particular have just grown to understand and appreciate the importance of it. So we talked at every leadership meeting about it in some regard, and we've been creating a major initiative called Return on Athletics that brings in a lot of data and assists our schools to not only understand the potential opportunities and how things are working on their own campus, but then be able to compare that with the 250 other institutions around the country and make some decisions based on those data.

SPEAKER_02
That's good to know, Jim. I'm working with several organizations, the different groups that support, especially private education. And I think that shared data is so important.

I think sometimes it feels like, boy, I'm not here by myself. What's it like? And you kind of think, oh, I'm competing against that other school down the road that we compete in athletics with. But a lot of times we're not really competing against one another as private schools.

We're competing against the other alternatives, the community colleges, the publics and things like that. And so the bigger publics, I should say. And so I think that's interesting.

I mean, what are some of the things that you kind of tell the schools as far as enrollment and I guess part of it is even retention? Talk through that a little bit, because I think athletics does provide a little bit of a unique solution for some of that.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. We talk a lot about, and I guess I first should say that we're only in the second year of collecting data from all of our schools. We had a couple of years of a pilot program where we had eight institutions and 40, but this is the, we're completing the second year of a full data set.

So we're still somewhat in its infancy, but the things that we've concentrated so far with some of our research briefs and some of the information we're sending out are, we've been really focusing on retention, as you mentioned, and just trying to analyze things like what size of a roster in various sports is kind of the sweet spot for retention. And if you get too large, does that have, does retention go down? And vice versa, if you're too small, what's the impact there? And in terms of enrollment, things like the impact of financial aid or competitive success, how do those impact the ability to attract student athletes onto your campus? And so right now it's, because two years does not make a trend in most people's eyes, we're speculating a little bit and really showing, here's our theory around those kinds of things, but as we have more longitudinal data, I think it's going to get even stronger and stronger, but at a minimum, it allows leaders on campuses to take a step back and say, oh, I thought about the, or maybe I thought about the appropriate roster size for us, but I didn't have any data to help support that decision. So now they're starting to think about it in that way.

And of course, on their own campus, they should have data going back even farther to help them analyze it on their own campus.

SPEAKER_02
I like that approach because I think that it's so important. I mean, I think so many times historically, colleges and universities have kind of seen athletics as, that's over there, that's the AD's responsibility. And I'm noticing a lot more schools are partnering between the athletics department and the admissions and enrollment department to just start to, and to degree student life with retention, but to really just make sure that everyone's talking with one another.

I know that a lot of times schools, especially smaller privates, rely a lot on the 30%, 40%, 50% on the recruitment of the coaches to fill their classes. But talk a little bit about how departments can be more facilitated with each other because I think that's a challenge that some schools face.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I think it's a great point, Bart. And for us, most of our data in that area is kind of anecdotal at this point. We're trying to gather various models and talk with people about what does work best and how do you think about, as you said, essentially the cooperation between admissions, financial aid, and the athletic department or the VP of enrollment coming in to that equation.

And I think the schools that are having the most success in athletics, and by that, I don't necessarily mean in competition, but the most success in terms of attracting students due in a way that's consistent with the discount rate they're trying to keep. And in retaining those students at a high percentage, those schools tend to have great integration between the admissions and the enrollment side of the house and athletics. And it can be structured in many different ways.

Some even put their athletics department, most of the coaches embed them in the enrollment area, where others just have cross-functional integration in some way. So there are a lot of ways to do it, but the schools who are not very effective at cross-communication and that integration are finding themselves struggling more so than the other schools.

SPEAKER_02
Okay, good. And I've got a few more questions about the business of student athletics. Before I get that, before we kind of move away from this data point, is there a place that people can access this data or is that for members or how does that work?

SPEAKER_03
It is right now for members only. It's a member benefit. We are in the process of creating what we're calling the Return on Athletics Calculator, which is kind of a, if you think of a mortgage calculator, you can go into a website of a mortgage company and put in your own data and find out what it might look like if you were to take out a mortgage with that company.

We're creating a similar type of tool so that schools who are not members can come in and get a little sneak peek and if they are interested in getting more information, it's a pretty, a very process to give us the exact same data that a member would give us, but we would ask for some, a smaller data set and then be able to give them a little bit of a snapshot of what it'd like to be in the NEI and have access to Return on Athletics, but that would be on, we've done it in a couple of occasions already and we're getting some NCAA Division II and Division III schools interested in learning more, especially as we're getting the chance, like we are with you all today, to talk a little bit more about it and have people,

SPEAKER_02
make people aware that it's a possibility. That's great. I love that idea of that tool, so we'll make sure that we've got a note of that for everyone.

I guess moving on, you just mentioned NCAA, you know, two and three divisions and I know that the way that NAIA approaches things, you know, a lot of people are familiar with NCAA and that's kind of the de facto, but tell me a little bit about the different approach that you take, you know, that people

SPEAKER_03
might not quite fully understand. Yeah, you know, our strategy and our vision for the NEI is to be the experts in the business of small college athletics. Our membership is made up of only small colleges, essentially.

You know, we do have a few that might be north of five or even a couple north of 10,000 students, but as I mentioned earlier, our average enrollment is just under 2,000 and so the ways in which those kinds of schools use athletics is very different than, you know, pick your big state school, University of Oklahoma or University of Tennessee. They're going to be able to drive revenue through, obviously, through sponsorships and their big television contracts and those kinds of things that just aren't available to small schools. So our belief is, and now I think the vast majority of our membership is in agreement, that they need to understand how to use athletics or drive enrollment and to, they can keep their discounts in check to be a net tuition revenue driver and things like that.

So our, we also focus on quality competition and making sure that our championships are run well and that only student athletes on the field and competition are ones that our membership agree should be eligible. Kind of the state, what people think of as the standard role of an athletics association, those things are still really important, but if our schools can't figure out a way to be profitable in a sense and keep the doors open, then none of that

SPEAKER_02
really matters. Right. And then about, you know, how does that work with, you know, like when we all think about, you know, D1 schools, it's all scholarship based. How does that work with

SPEAKER_03
NAIA schools? Yeah, so when, you know, as a comparison to NCAA, most people think of us as kind of a hybrid between NCAA Division II and Division III and by that I mean that our scholarship limits and the ability to give athletic aid is very similar to NCAA Division II. But our schools look a little bit more like NCAA Division III schools in the sense that most NCAA schools, NCAA III schools are private and small for the most part. And so the schools that are with us, at least some of them, like that model, they're, you know, they can compete against like-minded institutions, so they're not having to break the bank to compete.

Right. But at the same time, there is some value in being able to give a student or, you know, let their parents know they're getting an athletic scholarship. People can draw their own conclusions about what that says about society that some value an athletic scholarship more than an academic scholarship.

But I think that's just, that's just the way it is these days. And so, yeah, schools are able to use that to their advantage in a strategic way. And it's really a nice fit or a niche for NAIA.

SPEAKER_00
Good. Jim, when I think about collegian athletics, right now, image and likeness comes to the forefront. And I'm not sure if it's accurate, but when they first announced it, I thought that's going to give the bigger schools advantage over the smaller schools because the smaller schools might not be able to offer as much or offer some of the same things.

Could you speak to how smaller schools

SPEAKER_03
are taking advantage of the image and likeness rules? Yeah, Troy, I think your assumption is correct in the sense that there are just more dollars available and, you know, the economics are different at the big schools compared to smaller schools. But, you know, what we're seeing in the NAI, we eliminated all of our restrictions around name, image and likeness about three or four years ago, kind of a year, a year and a half before the NCAA got to that place and were kind of forced by the number of states who passed laws. So we've been at it for quite a while now and we have thousands of student athletes.

We have a total of about 80,000 student athletes and our estimates are that two to 3,000 of those at least are in some way shape or form taking advantage of naming and likeness. Now, for them, typically the higher dollar amounts would be, you know, maybe in five figures, there are a few students who might be earning more than $10,000 or so, but that's mostly because they have a huge following on social media and mostly outside of their athletic ability or talent. Right. They're just, they're just, they're pretty videos and other things and influencing. But they, those things would have been against the rules five or six years ago because the primary restriction that was lifted is students weren't allowed to associate themselves as being a student athlete at a particular campus.

And we all know on social media that's almost impossible to remove that from your profile or whatever else, you know, maybe a part of. So that's really open the door for a lot of those things. And then, you know, also can get pitching lessons or help coach kids and basketball and make some money.

Again, things that weren't allowed a number of years ago. And, you know, those are making a few hundred bucks here and there, as opposed to thousands. But, and then we do have the occasional, you know, Joe's pizza shop that will, you know, give all the office supply and free pizza just to, just as a feel good thing and to help them out.

Although some of those things you hear at D1, but just at a smaller, smaller level. So it's working well. We, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our great partnership with OpenDoors.

They were one of the first companies to come in and create a platform that not only helps student athletes improve their brand and understand how to promote themselves in terms of naming them into likeness, but they also have a marketplace. So they're bringing companies in and AI student athletes can reach out to those companies just like a D1 student athlete could. And so we have about that last count, a couple thousand kids in that, on that platform.

And we're just really starting to market it through our eligibility center and through other forms. So I think that'll grow

SPEAKER_00
exponentially in the next few years. And is that something that your organization helps your membership colleges implement and do better? Do you give advice on how their athletes can go after some of

SPEAKER_03
those funds? We do. And it's primarily through that partnership with OpenDoors. They're the experts in it.

And they're working with a lot of NCAA Division I schools, but with us, we created a partnership with them across all of our schools. Now it's not mandatory for a school to use them if they wanted to partner with someone else, they certainly could. But I think most of our schools are seeing the value of this collective marketplace and all the schools coming together to kind of work together to understand the different strategies for their students.

And it also gives them we don't have a huge compliance burden around this, but there are students need to disclose when they're doing these kinds of things. And if they're in the OpenDoors platform, it makes that almost seamless when you sign one of these deals. It's just automatic, but it goes into the system.

So we do see, so we're assisting through the through the efforts of OpenDoors, essentially.

SPEAKER_02
That's great. And I guess that kind of leads me to our next, you know, part of the conversation that we had talked about was the idea of, you've kind of discussed a little bit about, you know, the difference of the student athletes and in AA versus maybe some other associations. Tell me a little bit about the demographics.

I mean, obviously there's small private schools and and there's, you know, because their average size is 1800, I've got some ideas, but maybe just help me under to understand a little bit more about the demographics of the member schools and how that affects, you know, the student athletes that they that they recruit. Yeah. So, you know,

SPEAKER_03
in general, or 250 members and I think what a lot of people don't realize is we have close to 80,000 student athletes. So if you just do the math, that's a little bit over 300 student athletes per school. And obviously some have more, some have less.

But if you're if you're a campus of 1000 to 1500 students, and you have 300 or 400 student athletes, that's a big presence of athletics on your campus. And so schools are starting to understand just the importance, importance of that. The other demographics that come to mind is, we certainly have schools in big cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.

A lot of our membership tends to be in rural areas, which I think offer some advantages and some challenges to get to get students there. So again, athletics can be a nice driver of that. And we also have a lot of pockets, especially in the Midwest, where we have schools that are close to each other in geography, which creates natural rivalries and just schools that make competing against each other for almost 100 years.

And right. Fun things that can come about through that and really, not only from an enrollment and finance perspective, but just a nice experience for student athletes and students on campus when a couple 1000 people come out to basketball game because they want to see that competition

SPEAKER_02
against arrival. That's great. And I'm guessing that I mean, I work with a lot of small schools like the ones you described.

And I know a lot of our schools that we work with are our NAIA schools. And I often see sometimes that a lot of these smaller schools, not only in athletics, but just the overall population. So a lot of first gen students, there's a lot of Pell eligible students.

And so I'm sure that's kind of reflected in the athletics as well. Is that what you find? And do you provide any kind of member benefits or help that you can help schools to help? How can you recruit these students that are might not quite understand the whole,

SPEAKER_03
they don't know how to navigate the college experience? Yeah, I would say part the answer is yes, in terms of first gen students, I mean, they're a big part of athletics. And we're just starting to, because the tip of the iceberg is an analogy that comes to mind, we're just starting to have some good data around that. And the first area is retention.

We did a comparison of first gen student athletes compared to all other student athletes in the area of retention. And the first gen students actually retained at a higher rate than the non first gen. So we were pleased to know that.

And now part of the equation is, why is that? What are our schools doing well to retain them at a higher rate? We want to improve retention for all subsets or people overall. But I was very encouraged to learn that right off the bat. And then we want to help schools to understand what's working and why that's happening in terms of how to attract more first gen students.

We, that's certainly something that's on our list of areas we want to tackle, but we just haven't

SPEAKER_02
really gotten to that yet. Yeah, that's great. And I know a couple weeks ago, we had the Lumina Foundation for Education on the podcast, and they, I've done some work with them over the years.

And I know that they have done some initiatives around first gen students. And one of the important things that they identified and discovered in some of their research that they support are, you know, these different cohorts that, that, you know, first gen students can get involved in and how being in a, being in a specific cohort sometimes can add, you know, stickiness and retention to those students. Because, you know, come the end of semester, they're not, they're not, if they're already in a group or a cohort, they're not one to just kind of bail because they're just not making the fit.

And it seems to me like student athletics really kind of often serves that natural cohort. Is that kind of what you think too? Yeah, I agree. It's a great point.

SPEAKER_03
And something we can certainly explore and hope our data will support that. But it does, intuitively, that seems like a, a conclusion that I would, I would agree with in the sense that, you know, everyone wants to belong somewhere. And if you're a first gen student, it's, it's not something that's been talked about in your family as you were growing up.

And it's all brand new to you as you get to the campus to have a, have a built in family or built in cohort, certainly, certainly helps. And we know that for the most part, our coaches, that's part of the reason they're in their jobs, they want to win and they want to compete. But they're, they're going to help young people grow and go on to be successful in life.

And so I, I know that a number of our coaches pay special attention to those who don't, whose families don't have any college experience. I think that fits well with the, that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02
And it probably fits well with the smaller schools too. That's just part of the ethos sometimes of those smaller schools as well. Well, we've talked a little bit about student athletes.

And sometimes I think we have in our mind a, you know, particular type of image, whether it be a female athlete or a male athlete. But sometimes I've noticed a lot of associations are identifying some new student athletes that many of us might not recognize as student athletes. And I'm, I'm specifically talking about eSports.

And so tell us a little bit about eSports and, and how NAIA is starting to kind of look at that, because I know that's another very, very popular way that's, that schools are starting to look at other opportunities for recruitment.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I love to talk about our eSports efforts and the audience can bear with me. I'll go through a little bit of the history of it. And back in 2016, six years ago, it's hard to believe it's been that long, but we knew of six institutions that were jump again to start eSports as a varsity sport, to use a traditional word in sports.

Meaning they were starting to recruit students onto campus, as opposed to just students who are already there allowing them to play various eSports. So we, we brought in these six institutions and said, well, why don't we start an association to support eSports? Now, starting a national association with six members is a leap of faith that, you know, hoping that others will join. But the, you know, the, there was pretty good evidence that it was going to grow pretty quickly.

And so five of those happened to be NAI schools. One was an NCA Division II school, but they all agreed to join. And so we just started going down the path, not sure exactly where it was going to lead us, but fast forward to today, we have about 200 member institutions.

More than half of those are in the NCA for their traditional sports, some, you know, Division I, like the University of Missouri, a lot of D2s and D3s, and then the, you know, about 80 or so NAI schools. So it's a nice mix and a nice blend. And right now, size of institution doesn't, doesn't really predict success, you know, it just depends on, you know, what resources even smaller schools want to want to put into it.

But it's been, it's been great for the vast majority of those institutions. And the way I like to think of it is that for those NAI sayers out there, because I was a little skeptical when we first started doing it too, about, you know, the stereotypes of eSports players being in the basement, you know, eating Doritos and drinking Mountain Dew. But what we found is that it's just the opposite when you bring it in as part of the campus ethos.

And we were talking a little bit a few minutes ago about first gen students and wanting to have a sense of belonging and have a cohort that they can, can use to keep them on campus. And I think it's a similar concept with eSports. Now these students are literally going from playing eSports in the basement or in an apartment somewhere to doing so in many cases, right in the middle of the campus.

And they're, they're being seen differently by their fellow students. And they feel differently because they now feel like this is something that's legitimized. And you know, a lot of schools too are putting in physical fitness as a part of this and getting them, you know, giving them some assistance that traditional athletes typically get around academics and other things.

So it's, by and large, been, been just terrific. You know, you still have the concerns about, is it really healthy to play these games for 12 hours a day or whatever some of the students are doing. But my view is, most of them are going to be doing that on their own anyway.

So it's better to have a support system to help around it. So long-winded answer to say, it's just, it's fun to watch that we actually started a separate association so we could attract schools that were not playing their traditional sports in the NAI. And so it's called NACE, the National Association of Pleasure D Sports.

And it's just going great guns and still a very, a business that's still maturing and has a lot of growth and a lot of work to do, but by and large, great, great success.

SPEAKER_02
Now, are some of the schools that are members of NACE, are they offering scholarships or is it, is it kind of similar to the NAIA where some are, some are not, it's part of the financial aid package

SPEAKER_03
depending? Yeah, I would say it's, it's very similar to smaller institutions on the athletic side. Most schools are trying to package some e-sports scholarship as part of their financial aid offerings out to students. And there are a handful who are giving out what's close to a full scholarship, but that's, that's pretty rare.

So it's, you know, stacking on top of academic aid and other aid with maybe a $2,500 e-sports scholarship or given more than that, but it's definitely a

SPEAKER_02
partial scholarship model. I think that's very interesting. And I applaud you for stepping into that.

And I think that it can be a little bit of controversial or, or, you know, not sure about it. But again, it's a, it's a reality of our culture. It's a reality of life.

It's a reality of Gen Z and Alpha coming down the pike and, and really being able to lean into that and, and make that a part of our, our campus culture, I think is, is, is, is something that we should applaud. And I'm glad to see you guys taking some leadership in that at the, at the association level.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah, well, thanks. It's, it's exciting. And, you know, I sit on that board and I'm by far, I know the least about e-sports, many, many more.

So I'm glad that the rest of them are there, but I hopefully I can add a little something from running the association and just, it's, it's just a lot of fun to watch and to be a part of. That's great.

SPEAKER_00
Jim, at the top of the podcast, you mentioned admissions working well with athletics and some of the success that you have noticed. And I also know Bart has examples that he's mentioned in previous podcasts. Wanted to bring that conversation back and to encourage both of you to offer either examples or advice that you would give smaller schools on how they could strengthen that relationship to increase enrollment and also help in marketing.

SPEAKER_03
Yeah. You know, one, one institution that comes to mind, and I can tell you a ton about the exact structural campus, but Morningside College is a great example to me. They came over to the NAIL over 20 years ago from NCAA Division II and, and their Division II model, they had about 800 students total and about half of those were athletes and many of those were getting full scholarships.

So with the way the President, John Reinders, who's about to retire, explained it to me as, you know, the 400 non-athletes were, were having to support the school and kind of carry the 400 athletes who were getting, in a lot of cases, full scholarships. And so they came over to the NAI and built a model where now they have about 2,500 students and still have a lot of student athletes, but as a percentage, it's much lower. So they have five or six hundred student athletes, but he talked a lot about the importance of partnership between admissions and enrollment and the athletic department and that the coaches understand on the front side that they're going to try to help them win and they have, you know, they just won our football championship and they've won at a lot of levels and a lot of sports.

But for Dr. Reinders and for the leadership on campus, the important thing was, you know, how do we keep, how do we move forward with athletics in a way that supports the institution? And so the coaches also understand that, you know, it's just not an open checkbook that they have to do it in a responsible way and that they're going to give a good bit of aid to one student. They need to attract some students that don't need as much aid to come to, come to campus.

So that's one specific example of how it worked. And then I know there are other institutions, as I mentioned before, that actually put coaches into the, into the admissions office. And I think it's an interesting model.

I'm sure it has some challenges and I don't have as much interaction with admissions folks or enrollment people. But I know there are probably some who might think that's a bad idea. So I know you have to have to figure out how to do it on campus with politics and other things.

But I think, I think as Bart said earlier, coaches, there's, it'd be hard to argue that coaches are not the best recruiters on campus and know how to bring kids in. And so it seems, it would seem to be a shame if you didn't try to utilize that ability and that talent and that expertise and in some way to attract students in general and even use some of those tactics and strategies to attract non-athletes.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah. And I think too, Jim, I'll add to that, that I believe that sometimes the campuses that I see that are the most successful in integrating athletics and enrollment together are those that align all the way from the top down on mission fit. Because I mean, I think that it's so critical, especially at some of these smaller privates that are very mission oriented.

I mean, every school is mission oriented. Sometimes it's academic is the mission. Sometimes it's, you know, faith is the mission.

There's different ways that you can define mission. But I think that having alignment throughout all of the faculty staff, including coaches and recruiters on what are the best students that are actually going to flourish at our institution. And sometimes that's, you know, there are some tough decisions to make in that.

But I think at the same time at the end of the day, a coach that can retain a student from freshman to senior on a squad or on a roster is really going to see more success on the quarter on the field in whatever they're doing. And that's why I think it's so critical that, you know, mission fit students are the ones that get recruited. And I think that just adds value for everybody.

I mean, you know, the last thing a student wants to do is end up at a school that wasn't a good fit for them. And nobody wants that. And so I think that a lot of times that success works well that way too.

SPEAKER_03
Right. I agree 100%. And it is important, as you mentioned, they're, every school has a mission, but they're very different depending on the institution and where you are.

And one thing you said triggered for me, one of the things we're trying to do with return on athletics is help people understand that driving enrollment through athletics and do it in a financially responsible way doesn't mean that you can't be competitive. That you can do both. And we're finding a lot of institutions that are having the most success in competition are also finding success and driving enrollment on the financial side.

And we're trying to help them understand what's the cause and effect there and what's the connection. And we also have schools that are spending a lot of money on athletics and not having success. And I would, you know, an obvious thing to point out is everybody can't win.

Somebody's going to win and somebody's going to lose in each competition. But I think, you know, most of our institutions can be competitive and do it in a way that helps

SPEAKER_00
the financial impact on campus. Great. Jim, as we bring the, this episode to a close, we'd like to ask you if you have either an impactful final thought or a quick tip that you can offer as it relates to strengthening enrollment and missions through athletics that you would like to leave before we close our podcast. Yeah. I don't know if it's anything new from what we've

SPEAKER_03
already talked about, but it just seems to me for institutions that look like NEI schools and by that I mean schools that are around 2000 students and you know, primarily private institutions, this topic that we've essentially been talking about for the full podcast around how does athletics have a positive impact on the campus broadly. If schools aren't paying attention to that and they're in that category, I just see it, I can't understand why and I think they're putting themselves in maybe not a danger of extinction, but certainly are not exploring all the ways that they can be viable and sustainable over time. And so I know there are some presidents that still aren't on that train yet, so to speak, but as I go to CIC, Presidents Institute and other places, it's certainly obvious that more and more are thinking about it.

And so if there are any presidents out there or people in leadership positions on campus and they want to understand how we're looking at that data and the things that we're trying to do to help our institutions, we'd love to talk with them, whether they're in a position to potentially join NEI or not. I think we have some sense of responsibility to just make sure people understand that better and we have, I guess, a greater responsibility to our own members in terms of sharing the data and things like that, but it's an area that I'm passionate about and I think it's critically important. And so the last thing I would say on that is whatever your model is, that the cross-section integration, the communication between athletics and enrollment just continues to be more and more important.

Thank you, Jim. And

SPEAKER_00
for those presidents or anyone else that would like to get more information about NAIA or to contact you with further questions that they have after hearing the podcast, what's the best way for

SPEAKER_03
them to contact you? Yeah, through our website, NEI.org is the best and my contact information is on there, but it's just jcarjcaprr at NEI.org and I'd love to hear from anybody out there who has more questions and certainly could set up a call or a Zoom meeting if that's of interest.

SPEAKER_00
Well, thank you for being a guest on the podcast and helping us get this message out. I hope that it does spur more questions and inquiries that you can follow up on. Bart, do you have any final

SPEAKER_02
thoughts before we close the show? Yeah, just a couple things that I'm thinking is that I really like this idea of the business of student athletics. I think that so many times I think that we forget in leadership, especially as we talk about marketing, that there's an opportunity to look at different segments of types of students and how we market to them and how we recruit them. And there's athletics in high school and club and everything else is such a big part of our culture.

And a lot of those students will end up hoping to eventually continue their sport into college. And so I think that the opportunity that schools have for that level of marketing to those students and using that for recruitment is a great thing. And I think a lot of the things that we talked about in here is the importance of making sure that there's alignment between the athletic department and the recruitment department.

And I would also say alignment within the marketing as well, because the coaches are going to need support from marketers in the best ways to communicate. I mean, there's a set of rules around the recruitment of college students and athletes. And so understanding that and working with the athletic department, but being able to provide them is a separate type of acceptance package.

I mean, if you've got half of your students that you're on your campus, you're going to be student athletes. Maybe there's a special way that you also tie in the acceptance package. If you're sending a big folder or big presentation, maybe you do a nod and personalize it so it's toward their sport that they're a part of or their e-sports that they're a part of.

And I really like the idea of the e-sports too. And I applaud that because I think that's one of those things that is taking a leap of faith. It's going out a little bit further and doing something creative.

And I would also challenge the schools that are looking at e-sports. How can you use that marketing in that as well? I mean, you think about the platforms within the e-sports where you can buy ads even within the games themselves. And so what a great place if you have an e-sport program at your school to actually be placing digital ads within these games so that the students as they're zipping around the race track at 600 miles an hour, they see the ad up for your school go by.

So there's a lot of ways that we need to be creative when we start thinking about the recruitment of certain segments. And this is a good conversation about how to do that for athletes. Thank you, Bart.

And again, thank you to Jim

SPEAKER_00
Carr for helping us get this information out. And we encourage our listeners to contact him and the organization for further conversation. The Higher Ed Marketer Podcast is sponsored by Kailor Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency, and by Think Patented, a marketing execution company combining print, technology and personalization for deeper engagement with your target audience.

On behalf of Bart Kailor, I'm Troy Singer. Thank you for your listen.

SPEAKER_01
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