Abigail Funk is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management magazine. She can be reached at: afunk@MomentumMedia.com.

Two years ago, when University of Tennessee-Chattanooga Director of Athletics Rick Hart looked around the football stadium on game day, he couldn't help but feel disappointed. That season, the Mocs averaged less than 6,000 fans per game in a stadium that seats more than 20,000.

A year later, however, Hart was smiling as he took in the view. The football program averaged more than 10,500 fans per home game in 2009 and set a school record for season tickets sold. And as the team takes the field this year, Hart is beaming. Season ticket sales surpassed last year's mark in June and average fan attendance is expected to reach an all-time high.

How did the Mocs do it? "We came up with the 'Restore the Glory' campaign," Hart says. "Our football program used to be very successful, then we went through a period where we weren't and fan attendance waned. More recently we're having success again, and we're asking the campus and community to participate in getting our program back to the level it once was--to literally help us restore the glory we once had."

Every athletic director likes to see well-attended contests, but it takes a lot more than putting team schedules online and counting on loyal customers to return year after year. "That may have worked years ago, but not anymore," says Tracie Hitz, Director of Business Development at Old Hat Creative, a sports marketing company based in Norman, Okla., and former Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing at Northwestern University. "The biggest change I've seen in ticket sales over the past five or six years is how aggressive athletic departments have become."

Bruce Van De Velde, Athletic Director at Louisiana Tech University, says colleges don't have much choice because of all the factors working against them now. "Television is live-broadcasting so many games that it can be tough to get fans out to watch home contests," he says. "And families are also just so busy that weekends are often the only time they are together at home."

While the numbers involved may not be as big, many high school programs face the same challenges. "When our games are televised live locally, it hurts--and it hurts a lot," says Russell Wambles, Athletic Director at Apopka (Fla.) High School. "We always ask that our games be televised on tape delay and not live because we lose so much in gate receipts otherwise.

"People also don't have as much disposable income as they used to," Wambles continues. "With the economy being the way it is, everybody has had to focus on needs instead of wants. And if they do have extra money, they have to decide whether to go to the movies or the football game."

But there are solutions. Whatever the size of your school, marketing budget, and sales staff, there are plenty of ideas emerging that can help put paying fans in the seats. The keys are having a well thought-out mission, a good understanding of who you're appealing to, and effective promotions.

OVERALL APPROACH
Louisiana Tech has taken a number of steps to grow its fan base over the past couple of years, including creating a kids club and a young alumni season ticket program. But before it got down to selling, the department examined its program as outsiders.

"You can't sell more tickets and generate more support for your program unless you can do a better job of connecting with your fans," Van De Velde says. "In order to do that, we needed to see how we could strengthen our overall appeal."

The biggest need that emerged from athletic staff discussions was a uniform logo for athletics. "We had an identity crisis because we didn't have logos people could identify with," Van De Velde says. "We really wanted to change people's perception of us, and the most obvious way to do that was through a new logo. We re-branded and refreshed our entire athletic department just by updating our look and making it uniform."

Tennessee-Chattanooga took a similar approach with its new slogan. "We put 'Restore the Glory' on every piece of printed material we used related to football--every press release, every advertisement," Hart says. "We came up with a logo that established a brand for our campaign, and now we see it on shirts and hats and hear people working it into their lingo. 'Restore the Glory' has become a part of everyday conversations around here."

Re-examining your appeal to fans can also be done on a smaller level. At California State University-Stanislaus, the men's and women's soccer coaches approached Director of Athletics Milt Richards last year with the idea to start selling season tickets in their sport.

"I was skeptical, but both of the coaches said that the construction of our new stadium that opened for the 2009 season generated renewed interest in soccer in the area," Richards says. "They wanted soccer fans to feel ownership of their programs, like they were members of the Warrior athletic department by buying a season ticket."

The athletic department started by approaching people who had recently contributed to the Warrior Fund, then added contact lists it acquired from youth soccer clubs in the area. Everyone was mailed a brochure that explained the season ticket deals available--single tickets for $35 or a family plan for $75. Buyers who purchased their tickets prior to August 1 also received a free T-shirt.

Before the 2009 season started, the department had sold over 600 season tickets. Though Cal State-Stanislaus never had season ticket plans for any of its sports before last year, its success with soccer has led to similar programs for volleyball and men's and women's basketball for 2010-11.

Richards says one of the keys to bringing in revenue from the soccer season tickets was re-evaluating who got in for free. "We no longer give away many tickets, other than to our students," he says. "We eliminated complimentary tickets for the parents of student-athletes, for example. They are an untapped market, especially at the NCAA Division II and III levels. Parents are buying tickets to see their kids play from Pop Warner to high school, so why not have them continue to do so in college? Not only did we make some money with these changes, we also gave our tickets more value."

Giving tickets value is another important component of any overall plan. Hitz, who also sits on the board of directors of the National Association of Collegiate Marketing Administrators, believes you should never price your contests too low. "A lot of marketing people think $5 tickets or free tickets will get a big crowd, but once you set that value, that's how much the ticket is worth in the buyer's mind," she says. "Even if they have a great time, how do you get them to buy a $35 or $50 ticket for another game? A game is worth $5 to the fan because that's what you told them."

At the high school level, $5 to $7 for a football, basketball, or baseball game, and something like $3 for an Olympic sport contest is appropriate. But more high schools, like Apopka and Novi (Mich.) High School, are offering fans all-sport passes good for admission into every regular season home game in any sport, for the entire school year.

"At $175 for a family, our all-sport passes are a really good value," says Novi Athletic Director Curt Ellis. "We had to be careful with setting the price, though, because high school athletics is viewed as an affordable option for families and not an investment like college and professional team season tickets are. We presented it like this: If you take a family of four to a football game, that's $20 to walk in the gate. Then think about all the football games you go to each year and the winter and spring sports and you can see you're getting a really good deal."

AUDIENCE APPEAL
Along with generating an overall game plan for selling tickets, you also need some specific strategies for appealing to potential fans. The most effective approach, administrators are finding, is to break down your audiences into several different subsets: kids and families, students, alumni, and local community members.

One of the biggest trends right now is to focus on kids--whose parents tend to follow along. Louisiana Tech created a program-wide kids club last year that quickly generated more than 600 signups. For $30, LA TECH Kids Club members receive a T-shirt, laminated lanyard pass admitting them into all regular-season home events in every Bulldog sport during the year, and on-field access at some contests. At selected games throughout the year, kids club members can take on Louisiana Tech student-athletes in athletic competitions or attend exclusive instructional clinics.

"The kids club has worked really well for us," Van De Velde says. "Parents bring their kids to our games and see what fun it is and how family-oriented it is. Then the parents continue to buy tickets so the whole family can go together."

Students are another group that can provide a surprising return on your marketing investments. Tennessee-Chattanooga ran several student-specific promotions last year that proved successful, including an attempt to break the school's student attendance record at the football home opener.

"The chancellor sent out a call-to-action e-mail, and we did a lot of advertising through social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter," Hart says. "We also pitted our residence halls against each other in what we called the Residence Rumble, and the winners got a pizza party."

In the end, over 2,500 students showed up for the game--easily a new record for the Mocs. After the contest, the students were invited onto the field and thanked for attending. The athletic department hung a banner in the student union the following week featuring a picture of the student section and a note thanking the students and encouraging them to come back.

Hitz says that getting your students to games is a matter of figuring out what appeals to them. For example, Northwestern has very serious students, so the athletic department set up a pregame study hall.

"When people say all that Northwestern students do is study, that's not a joke," Hitz says. "We learned that they weren't coming to Wednesday night games because they had to study. So we created a pregame study hall where students could arrive early, study, go to the game, then study afterward before taking a shuttle bus home. They're the first ones at the venue and the last to leave, and they're getting everything done they need to. An assistant coach even comes by the study hall after the game to thank them for coming."

Older alumni tend to be one of the easiest fan groups to appeal to, and you may not need many bells or whistles to keep them connected. But greater efforts are often needed to reach younger graduates. The Young Alumni Program at Louisiana Tech hasn't yet made a big impact on the department's bottom line, but Van De Velde sees it as an investment.

"Through the program, our alumni between the ages of 20 and 29 who join our annual giving program at the $50 level can buy a half-price football season ticket," he says. "We want to get them used to the idea of donating and coming back to campus for football games. Then as their professional situation improves, they won't stay at $50. Maybe in three or four years, they want to upgrade their parking and seating, so they give $300 and still get half-price tickets. In their 30s, maybe they're giving $1,000 and paying full-price for tickets. It's not always just chasing the dollar that's important, but getting people to stay involved and grow with us."

Finally, there is your business community, which needs yet another type of appeal. At Tennessee-Chattanooga, the athletic department is working on helping business owners while helping itself.

"We have a downtown partnership here that focuses on driving business to our stores and restaurants, so we partnered with them on a 'Paint the Town Blue and Gold' promotion last year," Hart says. "In exchange for decorating their storefronts in our school colors, we gave them tickets and recognized their businesses on our video board during the game. Our student government was very involved in that promotion and helped to organize a pep rally located downtown instead of here on campus. It helped generate some downtown business and create a lot of local awareness for us."

Apopka has a strong community following at its football games, and though Wambles knows a good part of it is due to the team's success, he also makes it a point to tie the business community to the school's athletics as much as possible. One way that's done is through Apopka's all-sport pass packages, which combine season tickets with program ads. Depending on the size of the ticket package purchased, businesses receive a business card-size, quarter-page, or half-page ad in Apopka's game programs.

"Not only are we pulling in revenue and the community members are getting ads in the programs for their local businesses, but we're also keeping a connection between the town and Apopka's athletics," Wambles says. "I think it's a big reason for our great community support."

SELLING STRATEGIES
With an eye on how to appeal to different audiences, the final step to putting fans in the seats in making the sale. Selling tickets still comes down to selling a product. A key here is to decide where to put your sales energies to get the most return.

Tennessee-Chattanooga has concentrated a lot on season ticket sales with its "Restore the Glory" campaign. Another promotion that worked was targeting a different audience each month leading up to opening day, hoping to reach as many buyers as possible and keep the slogan fresh in fans' minds.

For example, June included a Father's Day special. "We put together a discount ticket package that we encouraged people to buy with their dads in mind," Hart says. "Last year it included two season tickets, a Mocs visor, a Mocs koozie, and a certificate to present to their dad. This year we added a Mocs grilling set with a spatula and tongs that have our logo on them.

"When we launched the promotion, we weren't sure what to expect, but it brought in a number of season ticket sales, along with new fans into our ticketing base," he continues. "We ended up selling over 300 season tickets in June--40 percent of which were new season ticket holders."

How much energy should you put into single game sales? "I suggest figuring out how much money you're likely to generate from each game," Hitz says. "If you know that over Labor Day weekend, you have a non-conference opponent no one has heard of and it will only generate 10 percent of your overall sales for the season, then spend 10 percent of your budget and 10 percent of your time on that game.

"Next, figure out which games are the top two or three that will sell best and put a greater percentage of your budget into promoting those," Hitz continues. "A lot of people figure, 'Oh, Michigan is coming that weekend, it'll sell out in a day. I don't have to do anything.' But you need to take the mindset that it's never a guarantee it will sell out, and if it does, those people better have a great time so they will come back."

Sometimes it works well to put extra effort into one really unique idea. For example, Tennessee-Chattanooga came up with a cross promotion between its football and basketball fans last year. It partnered with a local flooring company, which erected a temporary basketball court on the pavilion next to the football stadium, and held its men's and women's season-opening scrimmages on a football game day right before kickoff. There were big crowds for the basketball scrimmages, and then they walked right into the stadium for the football game.

Another place schools are investing resources is new operating systems. The traditional method of tearing tickets can be upgraded with good results.

Louisiana Tech has recently gone to scannable tickets and found a wealth of marketing information waiting. "We researched six different systems and ended up going with Ticketmaster's Archtics system," Van De Velde says. "Scanning tickets allowed us to start compiling a much more detailed history of who our fan base is--how they are buying, what they are buying, and where they purchase tickets. We now also have demographic information like age group, income level, and what brought them to the game--all immediately accessible in a computerized database. This helps us figure out who to target with our advertising."

At Novi, season passes were being used by more than one fan per game, and it was hurting the school's gate receipts. "Kids would come through the line, show their pass at the gate, then pass it to a friend further back in the line," Ellis says. "We implemented the TickeTracker system, which allows us to scan each pass. Once a pass has been scanned for a particular contest, it can't be scanned a second time, so there is no more passing back."

Ellis says the scanning system created several other positives as well. Fans can purchase advance tickets or year-long passes online, and best of all for Novi's fans and gate workers alike, it's made getting into a Friday night football game easier than ever.

"There is no line anymore since fans can just bypass the ticket booth," he says. "And we're dealing with a lot less cash on a Friday night. From a management standpoint, that's made our lives a lot easier."

A very recent trend is to outsource your ticket sales. One year ago, Georgia Tech hired The Aspire Group, a global sports and entertainment firm, to make outbound sales calls to recruit new ticket buyers for football and men's basketball games. In 10 months, the endeavor netted Georgia Tech over $1 million in new revenue.

What are the secrets to their success? One is manpower. The call center that operates out of Georgia Tech's athletic department, which The Aspire Group calls a Fan Relationship Management Center, is made up of 10 full-time and five part-time workers.

"There was no way that our department would have been able to have 15 people on the phones all day selling tickets, so this has been a great investment for us," says Wayne Hogan, Associate Director of Athletics for Public Relations at Georgia Tech. "We were surprised to be able to compile a list of over 100,000 contacts in our database that we had some form of communication with already but weren't season ticket holders. We just gave the callers the list and that was it."

The next step for those manning the phones is to be aggressive in landing the sale, but not bothersome or obnoxious. Employees of The Aspire Group go through intensive training before arriving on campus and calls are monitored by a supervisor. They're encouraged to make a connection with the potential buyer on the phone by asking them what would make their game experience better, and how the athletic department could help complete the sale.

"The workers are really aggressive and they don't give up," Hogan says. "If a potential buyer wants to see the football stadium and where their seats might be, The Aspire Group workers have access to our facilities and can take them on a tour--anything to make the sale."

The Aspire Group operates strictly as an outside vendor, and Georgia Tech is almost one year into its three-year agreement. "It's been far more successful than we ever anticipated," Hogan says. "I think their sales techniques are the wave of the future and more colleges will start outsourcing their ticket sales, too."

While sticking with an in-house sales effort, Tennessee-Chattanooga also tries to cater to individual fans. "You have to give people options," Hart says. "We tried to think from a consumer's perspective and created different ticket packages at different price points to appeal to a broad audience.

"Every school has people who want to park right next to the stadium and sit at midfield in a chair-back seat, so we have a structure for that," he continues. "There are people who don't want to commit to an entire season and just want to come to two games to try it out, so we have a structure for that. We will also diversify on the spot in order to give people what they want instead of forcing them to commit to something they don't want."

Apopka took a similar approach in creating three different levels of its all-sport ticket packages. "Our most basic package is two passes and one parking spot, our next level is four passes and two spots, and we have a third level for six tickets and two spots," Wambles says. "We know that parking can be tough around here on a Friday night when there's a home football game, so we included spots in the packages to make them more attractive."

The important thing to remember is that if your fans have fun, they'll come back for another game and be more willing to try out another sport. "Of course it helps to be successful on the field, but it's not just a game--it's an event," Richards says. "We always make sure we have good music playing before the game and something going on at halftime like a youth soccer league scrimmage or a fan contest."

And whatever your capabilities are in terms of a budget for game promotions or sales efforts, Van De Velde says there's no reason to leave your ticket selling to chance. "We're a pretty average Division I program, so we don't have the budget some of the bigger BCS schools do," he says. "But regardless of the dollars you have to spend, if you have a talented, creative, hard-working staff, you can really grow your fan base in any market."

Sidebar: Fan's View
Do you ask your fans about their game experience? Tracie Hitz, Director of Business Development at Old Hat Creative, a sports marketing company based in Norman, Okla., and a former Assistant Athletic Director for Marketing at Northwestern University, says you should.

"Researching your ticket buyers is really important, and not many schools do a comprehensive job of it," Hitz says. "If you don't know who's coming to your games and why, you don't know how to make them return customers."

When Hitz was at Northwestern, the marketing department came up with a survey to find out which variables impacted fans' decisions to come to a game. They posted it online and had workers ask fans the questions as they entered and exited games.

"One of the questions we asked was, 'Do you care how well our team is doing?'" Hitz says. "It turned out that variable didn't have as much weight as we thought it would. Instead, they were basing their decision on everything else at the game. That's why we're seeing more fan fest areas, video board cameras, and people throwing T-shirts into the stands at college games."

Northwestern didn't stop with a simple survey, however. The marketing department also went to the athletic department Facebook page and asked fans which games they were most excited about for the upcoming season, and who their favorite coaches and athletes were.

"We found out that our students really connected with [Head Football] Coach Pat Fitzgerald," Hitz says. "He was a player on our 1996 Rose Bowl team, he's only 34 years old, and the students just love him. So we started a Facebook page for him and when a student posted something on his wall, we made sure he'd get on there and comment on it. We all know college kids love free stuff, so we handed out T-shirts at games that said, 'Fitz is my Facebook Friend.' They just ate it up."

Along with learning about what you can capitalize on to draw more fans to your contests, asking tough questions can get results, too. In order to learn what Northwestern fans were not impressed with on game days, Hitz resorted to a unique tactic, logging onto the two biggest Northwestern athletics message boards.

Instead of posting anonymously, Hitz used her real name and title, and invited the posters to contact her with concerns, questions, or even new ideas they had come up with. "A lot of athletic departments are scared of the message boards, but the people on those boards are your most vocal fans," she says. "If they're complaining about something, you better listen. We let these people see how much we cared by getting on there.

"We found that over the next several months, the four or five really negative posters were scaling it back," Hitz continues. "We learned a lot, but there was also a residual effect of the boards being less negative. As much as message boards can spread false rumors and negative publicity, they can spread good stuff for you, too."