A few weeks ahead of the 2021-2022 school year, VNN’s Steve Doyle gives a refresher of the the company’s recent product launches: Digital Ticketing and Box Offices, Livestreaming, Fundraising and Donations, and Game Graphics.
Romy Glazer: Hey everybody it’s Romy from VNN. You know, it’s so wild to think but summer is almost over. I hardly can believe it myself, but with that in mind we wanted to take a few minutes today and do a quick refresher course on a few of the top products and top releases that we’ve done in the past maybe, three or four months that make your VNN sports hub better, just in case you need it because we’ve been away and maybe you’ve missed the announcements.
So we’re here today with Steve Doyle from our Ohio team. He’s been with the company longer than I have, he’s been working with schools in the Ohio state area. He’s out of Cleveland, everybody knows him everybody loves him. He’s going to walk us through four things. He’s going to do ticketing, he’s going to walk us through some live streaming donations, and of course game graphics with BoxOut Sport. One thing of note is that you’re going to notice that those things are kind of the front end, the parent facing side of your office.
But we also have a lot cooking on the back end, the back of office paperless workflow sort of products as well. You may have seen our announcement about our partnership with rSchoolToday, so there’s some syncing, there’s some integrations, and we’ll probably do a different refresher on all that since it’s, these are different things, they work together, but they’re a little different, maybe a different person wants to see them.
But if you know you’re looking for a scheduler or you’re looking for registration or daily health screening or facilities, or any of that stuff. Don’t hesitate to reach out because we’ve got all that covered for you too. So as always, you can ask questions in the tab. I think it’s on the right hand side of your screen if you’ve joined the webinar live. If you’re watching this on YouTube, all good. You can always, we’ll have email addresses in the description, you can write somebody, and we’re going to try and keep it to a pretty tidy 20 to 25 minutes, a little bit under a half hour.
So anyway if we don’t get to those questions, which happens sometimes, we want to keep it pretty tight. We will send those questions to the local sales reps or the right person or whoever needs to do it to get your questions answered. So just feel free to put them there, I’ll be watching and right now I’m going to hand it over to Steve who’s going to get us started.
Steve Doyle: Hi! As Romy said, I’m Steve Doyle, I’m the state manager for Ohio and I’m speaking on behalf of my colleagues all the other state managers really today. I just want to give you some highlights of some of our partner products, some of the things VNN is doing this year, what we’ve done last year, and for several of our schools what people like.
So the first thing I’d like to say is, after today’s meeting I encourage all of you to reach out to your VNN rep, whether it just be for a refresher on how to do things on your VNN platform or whether you want to learn a little bit more about what I’m going to talk about today.
So we’re here to help you, always here to try and drive more people to your website to save you time while you promote your student athletes. So, as Romy said there’s a few things that you really can’t miss heading into that this next school year, and we’re going to cover ticketing, live streaming, donations for your teams, and then BoxOut graphics, which is a really good graphics program that you can use on your VNN website, and more importantly probably on your social med channels.
So I’m going to share my screen here with you, and we’re going to go over a few things here. So ticketing, our partnership with Hometown Ticketing has just been fantastic. Last year, obviously with COVID, a lot of schools got pushed into digital online ticketing, and I will have to say, it’s pretty amazing, because here in Ohio I’ve gotten about over 300 schools, and a lot of my ADs were always like yeah, I’m really interested in that product. But then, they’re always like yeah, we’re really not ready for it yet, and then this year they got shoved into it. And some of those same ADs are telling me, oh my gosh I’m never going back to paper tickets. They will have to use some paper tickets, but they’re trying to use digital as much as they can.
So I’m not really going to give you a demo of how it works, I’m just going to show you how easy it is, and all this is going to, if you used Hometown Ticketing, your tickets are integrated into your VNN platform, so as a user I could just click on tickets, and then anything that you put into the HometownTicketing platform will come across here. So let’s say I’m like okay, I want to go to McKinley, and I want to go to their football game on August 13th. It’s a jamboree scrimmage against St. Ignatius. I’m going to go buy some tickets, so I click buy tickets, brings up information about this event, you can see it’s on the 13th, two o’clock, five dollars, at the Tom Benson Stadium. For those of you that aren’t from Ohio, that’s the pro football hall of fame. McKinley uses that stadium as their home field. How nice would that be? You’re a high school player playing in the shadow of the hall of fame stadium on Friday nights?
Awesome, so I’m going to buy two tickets, and then I just go to the checkout, tells me how much they were, what the processing, handling fee was, or convenience fee if you will, fill out my information, submit my order, and then I get my tickets sent to me via email, on my phone. You can use them right from your phone, go to the game, you got a little barcode on your phone. They scan you right in, if you’re old school and you want to print it out, have the barcode on a piece of paper, you can do that. So that is basically how easy it is to buy tickets online again. I encourage you to get with your VNN rep, they know their local Hometown Ticketing reps.
They can set up a 15 to 20 minute demo with you, you can buy season passes, you can do reserve seating, really just about anything you’re going to ask you can do. So you can learn more about it, how the money’s transferred over, the whole nine yards.
Okay the next segment I want to cover is Live Streaming. And before I show you a few things regarding Live Streaming, I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about the industry and what happened last year, and moving forward into this year, last year a lot of schools obviously got into Live Streaming with limited crowds attending their games. And most of them had a free stream available for their fans, and most people were doing that filming off of Facebook and YouTube channels, etc. And I believe you can’t even add a pay wall to it to charge per view, and most ADs, they were very happy last year not charging. But the word out there in the market is that next year, these same ADs would like would like to continue their streaming because they know they can capture a crowd that they’ve never had before. People that live out of region, out of state, they can’t make the games, etc., they would like to capture that, they would also like to add a pay wall to their live streams because they don’t want local people just getting comfortable and saying I don’t need to go to the game, I can just watch it online.
Now sometimes, people, they’re going to need to watch it online for certain reasons, and then obviously your audience that cannot attend the game, be due to distance, etc. You’ll be able to capture those viewers. And how it works here at VNN, is obviously we house everything on our platform and live streaming has been added to your platform under the watch button here. And we have three different companies that we partner with. We partner with the NFHS, most schools that use NFHS, they have a camera mounted usually in their gym and stadium, one or the other or both, and their live streams will, as long as their cameras turned on, and they’re streaming, they’re going to show up here and the list of their streams will show up here as well.
So your fans can be like hey, there’s a game Friday night being live streamed, great, and then when the game’s ready to go, you can click here and log in and watch your game. The other two companies we use are Rapid Replay and Just a Game. Both have great options for streaming that are mobile. You can stream from a phone, your cell phone, or an iPad. So I should say just any device, any tablet. So the great thing with these guys is that basically you can launch everything from your app so that you app’s going to have your schedules on there, what game’s being live streamed. As an AD, you can launch everything from here.
So you could go in here and go Varsity Baseball, click on it, and then you can start live streaming. And the great thing about this too is you can actually attach a hudl camera, or any time of high-end cameras, like some schools have mass communication classes and they have some really professional cameras that they use for live streaming, those can be attached to your app, and then as long as those cameras are on, you’re just going to launch your stream right from your phone. And then it’s going to show up again on your VNN site, we actually have scoreboard overlays, so when you’re watching a game, you can actually see what the score is, how much time is left in the game, etc. And again, you could be using NFHS for your stadium and your gym, and then you could be like hey, I’m going to use Rapid Replay or Just a Game sports for all my other events like baseball or track, softball, cross country, you name it.
You can actually go anywhere, you could go on to road games and film, film the games and live stream on your site. You could do school plays or show choir, etc., college signing days, all that’s going to be housed right here. The upcoming events will be in the top window, the games that are actually being streamed will be in the big window, and then you’ll have all your replays here as well. And as far as the difference between Just a Game sports, which we call JAG, and Rapid Replay, is basically how much money is shared with the school. You’re obviously going to make money from streaming. There’s different versions, there’s paid versions where you actually obviously are going to pay for a year subscription to do different things with your live streams, and there’s some that’s free where the school doesn’t put out any money but your fans, the crowd that actually attend the live streams are going to pay to watch it pay-per-view per se. So if you have not looked into live streaming or you have and you have not talked to VNN, again, I strongly suggest that you get with your local VNN rep, and they’re going to talk to you about what’s important to you as far as the streaming goes, and then we can kind of give you our suggestion as far as whether you should be using Just a Game or you should be using Rapid Replay.
Many of you out there already using Rapid Replay for doing highlight videos that you’re doing little video clips at games and they’re a great company to work with, great customer service, and they just added live streaming in this last year. So some people are really comfortable with already having the app and now they’re going to be able to launch live streaming off of that app, but you still are going to have to get it set up through your VNN rep. Okay so that is the end of the live streaming.
And we’ll move on to the next section, how many of you guys actually do fundraising for teams. A lot of schools as you know, the old fashioned way was they did cookie dough sales, mulch sales, car washes, 5ks, hey if you’re still doing that and you want to do that, that’s awesome keep doing it. What I’m going to talk to you a little bit in the next few minutes is basically how you can do fundraising through team donations, and team donations, the fundraising’s going to come from your athletes immediate families for the most part.
So Rally Around Us is a division, it was a standalone company that VNN bought, and it’s under our umbrella now, and we’ve had schools across the country that absolutely have done a huge fundraising, some states more than others. I know in Ohio that we just started getting some of the schools into this. Some schools can’t do it for some reason, some schools are like absolutely every one of our teams can do this, and I know our Maryland rep Brian Shuster has done a really amazing job in the state of Maryland there. They are all over this type of campaign, and basically how it works is we will house this on your team page with a donate button, but they will do a 30-day campaign.
And how it works is, let’s say I’m a football coach at Mia