On our latest webinar, Jayson Jones from our Sales Team walked athletic directors through the basics of the VNN Platform, and how it can help them do more with less.
Romy Glazer: Great everyone thanks again for joining us this morning. It’s 10 o’clock here, Central Time. This is a webinar that I think we probably could have done maybe a few weeks ago, where we talked about what VNN does. I know we’ve had this really successful series, or we’ve talked about cool things like digital tickets and social media graphics, and fundraising and at home workouts, and all these really cool technology pieces. One of the things we realized the past we as we were doing the work and kind of thinking about what comes next, is have we ever actually talked about what we do at VNN to everyone.
So we wanted to take this time this morning to give you a chance to figure out what we do. And this is a series where we just intro new tech. We’re all at home, so we figure we can all get smart together and, format’s pretty straight forward where everyone’s on you to start, and we run through a demo of the product. We talked a little bit about the company, and at the end we open it up for Q&A so. I’m asking, as the moderator, and there is a questions tab in the, go to Webinar menu, that you have, so I keep an eye on those. Feel free to ask them as they come t you or put them in the chat and I’ll watch. I’ll answer what I can and then if there’s anything I can’t, I will send up to Jason or Rick towards the end. I think we’re going to start out with another poll that I think will get us going for today, and it’s basically a pretty simple question, but what is your biggest challenge as an AD, and to take a quick second, answer that question, and then we’ll keep rolling along. But wanting to find that out, and so we can figure out exactly what you’d like to talk about.
Okay we see some responses coming in. All right we’ll give a few more seconds here to see where everyone lands. Cool, all right, awesome. So I’m going to close the poll now and share the results. Everyone can see where we are. So 67% of you said time, 14% said money, 10% said communication, and another 10% said technology. And, interestingly enough, everybody mentions paperwork, which, interesting. Really goo stuff, great. So with that I am going to kick this off to Rick Ehrman, CEO of VNN, to get it started. And then I also want to introduce Jayson Jones, VP of sales from VNN who’s going to lead us on this demo. But from here, take it away Rick.
Rick Ehrman: Thanks Romy, and thanks everyone for joining. We’ve usually found these session to be most productive to get the Q&A at demos quicker, so I want to make sure I don’t talk very much. But I do want to tee up a couple things. A little bit about myself, I’ve been with the company since July, come from the youth sports tech industry, was working at a company called Sports Engine for five years prior to this. But maybe more relevant than that, I’m a son, brother, cousin, and nephew of an athletic director, so we have athletic directors in my family. I also am a single father of five children, they’re all student athletes, so understand he challenges that come, not only with your occupation, but the industry in general. And not sure what I would do without some of the technology tools. Certainly around scores, schedule, standing, statistics, where it seems like we spend most of our time, but I think Romy’s question, or poll, hopefully makes it obvious to you that we really take feedback and input from you seriously. And everything we do as a company is really to make the lives easier of athletic directors, coaches, and parents of athletes.
So we have been working to become, you know, the credible voice in the high school sports industry. When it comes to technology sold, and we do that by analyzing data, listening to our clients, really evaluating the market when it comes to different things that we feel our efficiencies, and it didn’t surprise me to see that time was the biggest issue. And if you look at the slide we have here, this is, you know, the technologies we built. We built specifically to be able to integrate with things that we think are interesting and useful in your occupation. So we won’t go into these, but you probably know what a lot of these are, and a lot of these address the issues in that poll. So we’re in a unique position as a company to where we’ve actually had an unbelievable 45 days of growth and success.
I feel like our value proposition is resonating better with our existing clients and potential clients. And Jayson can get into, as he goes to the demos and testimonials, that’s really huge successes that we’ve seen not only with immigration partners, with high schools and their ability to kind of use us for mass communications in a time when over-communicating is not really important, but necessary. I don’t think any of us have a clear crystal ball on what the world will look like going forward, but we’ve made a strategic decision as a company to kind of go from defense to offense. We’re not waiting around for regulatory changes, or waiting around to see how the world changes. We’re making investments in areas of technology that, what helped you not only with communications, but things like fundraising and background screening, and all the things we know that, you know, take over parts of your day. So I’ll take a pause, maybe hand it off to Jayson. He’s going to talk a little bitt about the history of the company, more importantly the demo and what the tool actually does. One thing I want to mention, we have about 3,000 customers. I kind of skipped over the company history, but you can read, we are decentralized pretty significantly across the United States. This is a map if you’re looking at it that shows 43 different states, and 3,200 high schools that we currently work with.
When I mentioned investments that we’re making, we’re really invested in growing his footprint. So of the 20,000 high schools in the country, you know, we’re looking to aggressively penetrate the market over the next 12 to 18 months. So hopefully next time you see this, you’ll be one it and it will be more representative of the entire country. But as you can see, about 15 to 20 percent market share right now with rapid growth. In fact, significant growth even in the last 45 days we’ve acquired more customers than we did all of last year. As I mentioned the technology tools that we built or partnered with or purchased are really resonating with people, so hopefully we can use this session to help you understand why they’re valuable, how they create efficiencies, and how we thing about the world as it relates to making your jobs easier.
RG: Jayson I’m going to sign over control of the screen to you.
Jayson Jones: All right good morning everybody. You guys should be able to see my screen now with the same information pulled up that we were just looking at. Well I have, first off hi, my name is Jayson Jones, I’m one of our VPs. I’ve been at VNN nearly six years now and primarily oversee all of our states in the south and west part of the country, I’m really proud to be able to represent our two dozen person sales team from Oregon, South Carolina, Maryland, and Southern California and everywhere in between.
We want to say thank you, we appreciate you guys taking time for us. We know that things are crazy and your time is very valuable, so we appreciate and thank you for taking time to be here today to learn a little bit more about what we do. I also want to say thanks, we are huge fans of high school sports, we only work with high schools actually. We very purposely don’t get into youth sports or club sports or colleges, we really try to understand the needs and challenges that exist in high schools all across the country, and provide solutions to make your life easier, so we understand how important high school sports are. We understand what high school sports bring to local communities all across the country, and how integral of a role that you all play in that, so from all of us we say thank you. We’re huge fans of yours, you’re all overworked, you’re all underpaid and understaffed. It wasn’t a surprise to me to see the that time was the number one thing that you all said was your biggest challenge, so hopefully as we go on here, and I want to show you a little bit about what we do and how we do it. The theme of this webinar today is to do more with less, and that really is kind of our mission to all of you, is to simplify your life and make it easier so that you can spend more time with your coaches, more time with your student athletes, and make an impact that is really needed in today’s world. So let me go through kind of at our core what we do. You’re looking at a slide here that I like to go over and show you, that this screen on the left here as we dive into the demo is our, what we call a VNN home. And this is our admin and user panel that allows you to easily update your VNN site, whether it’s score or a quick text message, or a push notification, or you need to, you know, change a game schedule. We know that all of you are mobile, you’re on the go, you’re out painting a field, you’re filling water coolers in the gym, and so the way that we have set up our VNN system is that everything you need to better communicate with your parents and fans, or anyone that has an interest in the athletic department, you can do that from your laptop, you can do it in your office, and most importantly you can do it from your phone from anywhere you can get on the internet.
What that then translates into is a really nice athletic website, and most of you have an athletic site, so we’re big fans of that because you see the value in having a website to make your life easier. And hopefully you’ll be able to see some things that we do that are very unique to us that, you know, again might make your life a little bit easier.
So on this athletic website, it’s mobile friendly which is awesome. We see about 60% of our fans coming to our sites from their smartphones, and so if you’re currently working with either a school website company or someone else that doesn’t have that, you’re probably getting a lot of calls, or you’re getting some frustrated users because they have to pinch around and zoom, and you know, try to click on things. The other thing that we’re very proud of, in kind of a transition into this next slide, is we’ve invested a lot of time into making our sites ADA compliant. We’ve had many of our current customers that have told us the Office of Civil Rights from the DOJ are spot-checking schools, and actually taking complaints if their websites aren’t ADA compliant, and we’ve invested a significant amount of hours and resources to make our site ADA compliant, so that’s something that you can sleep easy with, is knowing that we take that very seriously, and all of our sites are compliant for the W3 standards for online accessibility.
So if you haven’t heard about those ADA compliance issues, everyone that we talked to say it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, that they are reaching out to most of the schools all across the country to ensure that their online sites are compliant for all different users. Whether they have epilepsy, or they’re blind or deaf, your sites need to be able to accommodate all users. And our VNN site do just that.
Okay, so let me get into an actual demo of, you know what it is that we do, I’m just going to pick an area of the country that I used to live in. Gainesville High School in Florida. If I go to their website, their school website, and I click on sports, you’ll see that I come to a page where I’ve got a list of all the teams with an athletic main page, and this is pretty common. No school website is really built for athletics, it’s just kind of a section that they add on. And so if you’re the athletic director at Gainesville High School and people want to know what’s going on at the athletic department at your school, it’s really difficult to tell someone, “Hey, you go to SBAC edu slash site, slash default, slash aspx, etc., etc., etc.” It’s really hard to market that, and it’s not an easy thing to do. So where we come in, is I’m going to show you a school that we now work with. This is Arundel High School, so if I’m a parent or a fan of this school and I go to their school district website, and I click on athletic, you’ll see that I go to Arundelathletics.com. So on this Arundelathletics.com site, it’s custom branded with your logos and your photos, your color schemes, every single one of your sports and teams will get their own page, or their own kind of mini site within the website. Which we’ll get to here in just a little bit.
This is great for branding, it’s great for you from a control standpoint, where if you have booster moms or clubs, or a site that’s, you know, for your baseball team and you got a completely different site for your volleyball team, it’s really hard for parents to keep track of that. Especially if their kid plays multiple sports, and we’ve also heard that there are some Title IX issues that may come up with that, so one of the things we’re really proud of is that this allows you to celebrate all of your athletic teams. All the way from, you know, the varsity footballs of the world all the way town to, you know, the freshman girls softball team, or the JV girls tennis team. And it’s all in one place, so we’re really big fans of that.
The other thing that you’ll see on our sites, and I’m going to bound through a couple of different ones here as I go, is that we have a more section that is completely customized for you. So if you’re getting calls about summer camps, or about eligibility, or anything that you’ve wanted to have a better place to put online, maybe it’s booster club information or your fight song, or a coaches corner, you get complete control to update and modify these pages, to whatever is specific to your athletic department that you want to post. All customized just for your school, so we get great feedback from our customers on that, that if they have another website, it’s you know, hard to do or it’s hard to navigate, or theres limited space, where with us, you can go in and completely customize this for whatever your needs are.
The last two things that I’ll show you, one here on these sites, is that we have social media integration built in, so anything that you post on our website, whether it’s a score report, or a it’s a story, we’ll automatically post that same link out on your Facebook and Twitter account. So instead of having to write something on your school website and then open up Facebook and post it there, and then go and send a tweet out, we do that with all one click of a button. You use our VNN system, you post an article, you post your photo gallery, and with one click of a button it will automatically post to your school website. And it automatically posts to the Facebook and Twitter account that are linked up to your page, so great feedback, they’re a really big time-saver for you.
Okay, the other thing similar to ADA compliant, because we know that we live in a very diverse world, and some of you are in very diverse areas, we also build in a translate feature. So up at the very top of our site, you’ll see the universal icon for translate, and we use Google Translate that will automatically convert your site from English to Spanish in this case, or any of the languages in the Google Translate feature. If any of you have very diverse populations, or anyone that needs to get information in a different language, similar to ADA compliance, we’ve built all of that into your VNN site, and we get great feedback from certain areas of the country. That’s a really big deal.
The next thing I want to go over on, just a differentiator or something that’s really important, we know all of your coaches may have the their own individual side, so they would like, you know, their own page, and how to be more customized to them. So when you go to any of our individual team pages, you’ll notice that any of your coaches can update a team photo, they can add team information and they can really customize their own pages, as well as adding their own social media accounts. So if they have a, you know, in this case the Bonita baseball team has their own Twitter account, in addition to the main Twitter account for the athletic department, so they’ve gone in and synched up that with their site.
Another thing we get great feedback on from our parents and fans are our roster pages. And our roster pages are set up where you can easily add a foster to your page, and create these really nice player cards. They look very collegiate, and it’s very professional when you can go in, kind of by team, and see your individual roster page just for Boys Varsity Basketball. Okay so that’s a little bit about our team pages.
The next section I want to go and spend some more time on is our schedule pages. So probably the most important thing that all of you will have to do is manage schedules. And you want to have an easy way to get information out to your parents and make sure that everything is updated. So we have a calendar tab on our site that comes in, and obviously we have a lot of events that have been cancelled of late, so I’ll go back and show you March, but on this site that you see here, all of the scheduled by date and by time in order will show up for every single team. That is on your site now, these schedules are only entered into our system one time, or we have a scheduling partnership. I’m going to go back and show you this slide here, if you’re working with an event link for a Home-Campus, or in Our School Today, or Arbiter, or OSAA, we can get your schedules over to your VNN sites without any extra work. And anytime there’s a change made in your scheduling company, it will automatically update on VNN if you aren’t using a scheduling company. That’s just fine, because our system has a built-in scheduling tool, and once you enter in schedules into our system one time, we do multiple things for you.
So if I were to go back to this Gainesville page and show you their volleyball page, and I come over here and click on their volleyball schedule, this is a scan of a word document that the coach had to type up. So if this game on the 29th of August got changed for whatever reason, someone would have to go back to the computer that that word document was on, pull that word document up, edit the word document, save it as a PDF, rescan it, sent it to the IT person to re-upload, whereas with us it’ll automatically pull that schedule in and you can, from your phone, go in and change the time or change it from your scheduling company, and it’ll automatically do that change on our site.
The other thing that you’ll see on our pages, is when you get into the individual team site, we have schedule pages there as well, and the schedule for the individual team will post on that page here, so easily accessible.
Another great feature that we have built in is a subscribe button for all of your parents, athletes, and fans. If they want to get this schedule on their phone, or if they’ve ever asked you about, hey do you, have, you know, the schedule in a calendar where I can put it in my phone when they go to your site now, and click the subscribe button, it’ll automatically get that schedule to their phone, and any changes that are made will automatically get updated on their phone calendar as well. So again, one scheduled entry point, and it goes everywhere for you without any extra work. And we also pull in Google Map driving directions to make it really easy for your parents, especially great for sports like cross-country or golf or tennis, that may not be held a the school. Wherever that event location is that you are sending the team to, it will automatically link that up and give people the driving directions to the game.
So another great feature there, the last thing that I will go over on, kind of our sites, and just kind of our core sites that you see here, are some of our photo galleries and our newsfeed as I mentioned up above. Anytime you post a story to your VNN site and you need to get the information out there, it will automatically post that story on Facebook and Twitter, so if I’m a mom and I’m strolling through my Facebook feed at home, and I come across this Bishop Moore story in my Facebook feed that got posted, as soon as I click on that story it will take me back to your page. So again, really really big on doing something one time, having it do multiple things for you, and having it post out to social media.
Okay, Rick had also mentioned wanting to follow along with scores and know how your teams are doing, and we know what a chore that is for a lot of your coaches at the end of the game. They usually have to call a newspaper, they’ve got to text you, as an AD they might have to send a note to the conference chairperson, or the sports information director, and so the one area of our site that I want to show you is Press Box. And we’ve had customers of ours that have mentioned to us that they have actually purchased our platform or got really excited about working with us just because of Press Box alone. And I want to show you what that score reporting tool looks like and all of the great things that happen for your as an AD and for your coaches when they use this system to post scores.
So let’s say it’s the bus ride home at the end of the day and we just got done playing our boys lacrosse game, and I need to post that score. When I log into Press Box, and again this can be done right from that app or from your phone, they are going to see a schedule a box score page for the game, and just for the ease of use, so I’m going to go through here and just do a quick score report with the final score. The box scores are all sport specific, so when baseball comes up, you’ll see seven innings. Soccer will be two halves, volleyball will be five sets, etc. You can add a title to your post, so we, I might want to say great win on senior night, or if you just want to use this, use example, our system will automatically drop in the name of the team and who you played to write the headline for you. Under the recap you can copy and paste from like a game changer, or from your stat company, or you can actually just go in and put we won, or maybe you want to give a little bit more information and say that Johnny scored three goals, and little Timmy has two assists.
Okay I can add a photo to my story if I would like to do that, or I can add a file that will go out to the media, and then I’m going to slick save. And it’ll say hey, once you’re saved, you’re ready to click post and share. When I click post and share as a coach or a statistician, anyone that you as an athletic director give access to be able to do this, there are a few different things that happen. The first thing that happens is when you go to your new VNN website, our system will automatically write a story on the main page of your site for you. When you click into that story, it will have the recap with who won, and that update as well as the box score here. That story, because it’s a boys varsity lacrosse game, when I go to the boys varsity lacrosse page, will show up on their team page as well. It will update your schedule, so your schedule now becomes like a living breathing document that people can keep going back to. So when I go into that schedule page and I see that game we just posted on, with the four to three win, it will be posted there, which updates your win-loss record. That story also gets posted out to the Facebook and Twitter accounts linked up for the team, as well as the main Twitter account for the school. And most importantly, when you go and check your, or, anyone one that you load up in your address book will get that score report via email. So we work with schools that will upload local newspaper contacts, radio stations, the secretary at the front office that does the morning announcements. You as an AD will get all of the score reports via email as well, and anyone that you want to get this information, instead of having to do that manually, or sit on the phone for half an hour with the local paper, you can input all of their information into your Press Box contacts library. And all of those score reports will go out that way.
So that’s again, one thing I wanted to make sure and go over. It’s probably the thing that we get the best feedback on, it’s a much simpler and easier way, better way, to get your scores out at the end, and it turns your VNN website into like the local newspaper, or the local paper, just for your school.
We know that local media are getting smaller and smaller, there are a few prep sports writers that are out at all of your games, and most importantly they’re usually at the, you know, varsity football game anyway, but this is a great way for the softball team, the baseball team, the wrestling team, all of your teams at your school to get the notoriety that they deserve. And again, this Press Box application can be done from the app or anywhere else you can get online. It can be done that way.
Romy I saw the thing bouncing, do we have questions that I need to address right now, or do we want to keep going and I’ll finish up and we’ll go to a Q&A?
RG: Great question. Let’s keep rolling, we’ll get through all the content, and then at the end, I’m collecting a few, writing them down, and we’ll be ready to go.
JJ: Okay excellent. So the last thing that I will share with you guys are our integrated partnerships. The, you know, this mission that we have with allowing you as a school to work with the best technology companies that are out there, but have it all be integrated into one place. We’re really really big on that, and we’ve invested a lot of time into making that happen so that you can work with the, you know, best of breed companies that are out there. So if any of you saw our BoxOut custom graphics here, you’ll notice here that like, this Lyla Zedell graphic here, or Tyler Watson. We work with this company called BoxOut Sports that creates really nice custom graphics for game days, for senior spotlights, we have schools that will use it for just their regular school site. It makes it seem like you spend hours inside of Photoshop, and this was done probably by someone on their phone in a matter of minutes.
The other thing that we’ve done and kind of prepping for, this new world that we live in. Our online tickets, so you know instead of having to handle paper tickets and handle cash, and you know we know what the future might hold there with people not wanting to, you know, handle money and pass, you know, paper tickets back and forth, we have a completely integrated online ticketing system that will allow you to do season passes, individual game tickets, prom tickets, it allows you as an athletic director to send free comp tickets to your sponsors, and it’s all integrated in your site. So we know you’re not going to be able to spend as much time with your parents at the school this year, and usually you’re doing season passes where parents come to the school, or they send a check with their, you know, son or daughter to come and buy their passes, and we have a completely digital experience where, you know, your fans can go to your website, look at all the fall passes there are to buy, buy their passes online, get a digital pass so that they don’t have to get a card in, and we handle all of this on your behalf. The same thing goes with online paperless registration. So we’ve been talking with a lot of schools that are worried about, “Hey, I’m not going to be able to send them a paper packet with the kids in spring this year, I don’t want to make these parents print out 15/20 pages of paperwork”, maybe some of them don’t have a printer, and I certainly don’t know how they’re going to get those papers back to us, and I don’t know if we want to have those paper that have been touched by everyone coming back to our school.
Anyway, we have a completely integrated online registration system that is, all again, ties into your VNN site really really well. And then lastly, what we’re really helping schools on, game planning for the future, are integrated online fundraisers. So you know we’re not sure if kids are going to be able to do golf tournaments, or they’re going to want to go door-to-door, or be able to sell things like they usually have in the past, so we have an online donation system that allows your fans from in the area, as well as outside the area, to really support their teams. And when you go to our individual team pages, you’ll notice a donate button. So when I click donate, if I’m a fan, you’ll see that I can come to the page and make a donation right to your team, and then there’s no money that has, you know, been exchanged.
And it, you know, will help your student athletes.not have to go out and door-to-door anymore. So, from online ticketing to registration, to, you know, all of these safe, convenient paperless online hands-free ways to get information out to everyone is really some of our, you know, things we’re really excited about, and we’re getting great feedback from our current partner schools that visual thing that they’re talking about planning for, just out of school yesterday call us and say, hey our superintendent wants a plan on his desk to go completely cashless like, so this ticketing thing that you mentioned or online registration, where I can pay those fees online, like we can, we can help you out there. And the best part is it’s all integrated into your VNN site.
The other thing, and we’ve been talking about it but I just want to make sure to mention it here, is that a team app. So if any of your coaches are using a Team Snap, or team app, or they use a Google Calendar or a group me chat, our new VNN Team App, which is free for all of your coaches, is like all of those things built into one. It’s got a chat feature built in, where once your coach invites all their players and parents, they can chat right with inside the app. They can add practice calendars or team schedules, or team events into the calendar on the site. The parents can get those calendars right on their phone, and then everything that you do on VNN and inside of the app automatically updates your site. So we really are trying to get as a, you know, this platform built out for you that allows you to have one place where all of your sports and teams can be found on one site. It’s mobile optimized, its ADA compliant, it’s unlimited storage, it’s branded just for your school, we’re really big on this safe and convenient.
Rick said we were going on the offense, and we’re really trying to bring cutting-edge technology to the high school space that is safe, and most importantly very very convenient, and easy for all of you. We’re big fans of other tech companies that are out there, we try not to force you to have to do one thing, we want to be able to work with the best people that are out there and have it all work together in one spot, and we’re really trying to make it where you’re going to get more done in a more efficient manner with less work and resources, and have it all just work out together in one spot. So that’s all I have, Romy, happy to answer any questions that we’ve got or we can go into the next section of kind of our pricing and special offer.
RG: Yeah let’s do that, let’s run through pricing and then we’ll knock out the Q&A at the end.
JJ: Perfect. Okay so our pricing on our VNN platform. Kind of just standard, everyday, with the website, the free Team App for all of your coaches schedules and social media syncing, online tickets, built-in fundraising, is a one-time $1,500 setup fee. Some of the other things we talked about do have an annual fee, but our base platform is always just a one-time fee. And what we’re offering to all of you that are on the line is a $500 credit. So you can use that to make the platform $1,000, or you can use that $500 to look at online registration, or maybe you want to do an upgraded custom graphics package, or any of the other things that we, I didn’t have a chance to go over. But this, our $500 credit to you, as a way to say thank you for all you’re doing, as a way to help you get set up for fall sports next year, and hopefully make your life a little bit easier.
RG: Great thanks Jayson. Alright, let’s roll into the Q&A. Okay so we had a few questions that came in, I’m going to take a look at the first one from Ray, which asks can we average in your high teams on VNN. Can you talk a little bit about that Jayson?
JJ: Yes, yep, absolutely we can. I will actually pull up, I will actually go to one of our sites and show you that if you have feature middle schools, junior high, absolutely. And so if I go to Temple site, you’ll see right here they actually have three different middle schools that feed in. They’ve got Travis, Lamar, and a bottom, and so they’ve added all of their individual teams. And what we’ve heard is, that young kids really like it, because they get to be on in the same spot, and it gets, you know, as like the, you know, varsity standout athletes, like you to be on the same plot of them, and that’s what I want to be one day, and you’re training your parents that from an early age, this is where you go for everything, but we can absolutely have all of your lower level teams on your site.
RG: Awesome, okay so there was a second question, but I think it’s kind of a bigger question, it probably flows into some of the little school stuff too. So this one came from Levar, and he is asking on the score updates from coaches. Is there a way that an AD can approve a post before it goes to the website or media. So I guess Jayson, the question kind of is, you know, can you have, can you share the load with your coaches, and beyond that, like, how do you, how do you manage control as an AD, and as a whole.
JJ: Fantastic question. So our system is set up to give access down to the teen level. Levar, I think that you said that was his name, so when you go into our system, and actually get into where you will provide access to coaches or to statisticians, or team moms, or the team manager, if you want them to just have access to freshman football, that’s like we actually get down to the team level. Beyond that there are different permission levels on if you would like them to have access to be able to post a story or not, and by default anything below varsity does not go to the local media. So by giving that coach access to post a score, it would write a story on your site, and it would go to social media, but it wouldn’t go to the local media. But you as an AD can go into all of the posts, and if they didn’t put a period in, or if they didn’t do something like that, where you can edit it, but by giving them access, they can post. But we do limit to what they can post and where it will get posted.
RG: All right cool. Let’s see, so we had a few questions coming from Coach Lawson. Hey coach, let’s see. So they were asking how do you add in our school schedule to the website. And so I think, you know, Jayson it would be really helpful maybe to go into, what are some of the scheduling sources, and maybe show, you know, the screen where people are able to sync the pages if we have a few seconds.
JJ: Yeah. So coach, great question. So we have one thing we didn’t talk about, I probably should have, is that we have a fantastic, best in the industry, support team. So when we actually get your site sett up, you’ll have a one on one call with our support team, and we find out where your schedules are coming from, and, you know, down to the team level again, so we actually will do all the work for you. There’s no work that you have to do with our school, we actually work on all of that in the background so that when you go to your website, your schedules are actually update, and they’re actually already there. Our, with Our School Today, right now when you make a change in Our School Today, every day we go out and look for new changes, and automatically update them.
But let’s say that you made a change in Our School Today at 8 a.m. this morning, and you need to go in and update the speed. When you log into your system, and again, if you still see my screen this is what it will look like for your school, if you just change the JV baseball time in Our School Today, and you want that to automatically show up on your site, you’ll come to our system and just click this “Think Schedule” button, and it’ll automatically go out and find any of them for that team. So we do it automatically during the day for you, but if you need it immediately, you can go to our system and just click that one button, and it will automatically pull in those changes and those changed events to your site.
RG: Perfect. Okay question about advertising. So someone mentioned they notice there’s some ads on the site. You know, so that revenue go to your school, like how do that work?
JJ: Sure, yep. So as I mentioned in the pricing, our base system is a one-time setup fee, and then it is free to use. And what we do, is we actually handle all of the sponsors on the site for you. We work really closely with you on that, all the ads are family-friendly, and we have an entire team that they will get sponsor on your site, and then we share those profits back with you every year. So some of these really cool things that we’re doing, you know, our goal at VNN is to be able to have you get all of these, you know, all of our core site, plus any of the other cool things that may have a fe.. And VNN is actually a site that can make you money, and not end up costing you money. And we’re very unique in the industry, in that we don’t charge for that, we actually are the ones that go the other way and try to help you make money on your site.
RG: Sweet. Okay question, another scheduling and sync question coming from Chris. So he was asking about fees and schedules, and just which way the sync works. So he was asking, should I input fees and schedules on VNN, and then it syncs out to MHSA or Arbiter, or should I enter it into Arbiter and the net syncs to VNN. He likes to run a weekly master report for planning purposes, and was curious about the syncs and how those work, and you know what we’re looking at doing for the future.
JJ: Yeah so another great question. So we do a pull system. So we pull from all of our scheduling partners whether it’s Arbiter, whether it’s Our School Today, or Home-Campus, or Event Link, we pull from them. So you’ll always still have a, like, one schedule source where you’ll update everything in arbiter and then our partnership with Arbiter allows us to pull stuff from there. So currently, we’re not sending any information out to any source. We’re just puling it in on your behalf as the school, so you’d definitely update it in your scheduling source, your Arbiter, or Our School Today, your Home-Campus, and then pull that and then we would pull that to your VNN site for you.
You had mentioned about a weekly report, one other thing that I failed to go over was, every Monday morning, our system will automatically write a story on your VNN site. And it happens and it will get posted to Facebook and Twitter, and this story was automatically created with all of the events that are in your scheduling system. And this happens without any work on your part. So schools love this because when they come in for Monday morning announcements, they just tell them to check the site, and all of the information for those games will automatically come up here. And, that, if I’m like oh the softball team is playing Lake Highland Prep, I’m going to take a look at that, we also create these really nice-looking event preview pages that we’ve seen a lot of our ADs and coaches go out and share on social media, or tweet out. And it’s a great way to get information out on the game that day, without having to go spend a ton of time. You can just click one button and it will automatically post that out for you.
RG: Cool. Let’s see so, we’ll take, I guess we’ll go to one more, and then I will take a look at all the questions, and we’ll get them. Anyone that we didn’t answer, we’ll send them to the right person and touch base after, but one of them, is there a penalty if you’re not ADA compliant. So that was interesting.
JJ: Yeah, so, I got my law degree out of a cracker jack box, so you’ll have to, I don’t want to give any binding legal advice on here, but what we’ve been told is that the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Justice, if you’re a public school, they are auditing kind just on a random basis. And all of your websites, from your school district website, to your athletic site, anything basically you link out, need to b compliance. And there have been some schools that have had monetary fines. If you do a Google search for Seattle Public Schools and ADA lawsuit, I want to say that they had to settle a pretty hefty lawsuit because someone that did have a disability wasn’t able to access their content. But again, some of that changes and is obviously interpretive by the DOJ in the Office of Civil Rights. But at a high level, to answer your question based on what we’ve been told, is that there could be fines, and you know, threats, or actually losing federal funding, because if you’re a federally funded school, you’re not complying to federal guidelines. We have heard that from some of our partner schools.
RG: Right so we’ll pop into the last one. So one person notice the background and was curious about how customizable you can make those.
JJ: Yeah so we, we get between 20, well we always ask for about 20 photos of your team’s, your athletes. You’ll see we can do athlete cutouts on the side, we have some of our schools that will do their school logos on each side, and then just a couple of other ons that I like to show is kind of like a media wall background. So if you have like, two different logos, you can do a media wall background, or you can actually do just like, pictures with a color gradient overlay on the side, so, you know, these are just individual pictures with a, you know, gradient overlay. We have a fantastic design team that does all of this, and you’ll work with our school support team to pick the type of background that you’d like, and you actually send in the photos that you want to use, and then we do all of this work.
RG: Right. Okay so I think Jayson, it would make a lot of sense if you wouldn’t mind pulling back up the slide with who to get in touch with, and just kind of this cost and pricing. Yeah, thank you everyone for being here today. I hope this is super helpful. You’ve got Alex’s email on the bottom there if you want to send a note, and then we will divvy it up. We have a local sales team across the United States as well, so we use Alex as a point person to then distribute out any questions or anything of interest to the person who’s local. I know we’re not able to like, come in and shake hands at the current moment, but oftentimes we did, and so they’d be more than happy to get in the call and a lot of them remembers your community already. So feel free to email Alex, and thank you so much for the time.
One really funny thing to kind of, to leave everyone with. Scott made a mention of ESPN having the ESPY Awards, and whether or not we have though about creating categories for yearly awards for stories and artwork on VNN, and I laughed because what a great idea. And yes we have though about it, and I think you know, one of the things that I get to do which is really fun in marketing, is take a look at all the best stuff from everyone across our network and share it around. So to sort of leave you with this, you know, we want to do more with less. We think our product helps save you time, and on the flip side, you know, we also want to build a community of athletic directors and people who are all interested in getting better and learning and doing things for the community. So you know, on our side, we’re also dedicated to sharing the best stuff and helping you learn and grow.
So yeah, just want to leave with that, but thank you everyone. Jayson, thanks, Rick, thanks, and we will catch you later.
JJ: Thanks everyone. Hope you guys have a good rest of the spring and summer. Take care.
RE: Thanks Romy.