“Fancred is a sports-focused social network for fans to connect and share content and opinions about their favorite teams and sports. It’s a free app where you can post articles, gifs, photos, comments, and trash talk with other fans.” This excerpt, taken from the Fancred Community Leader Playbook, outlines the company’s goals and vision. The site was founded by Hossein Kash Razzaghi, a Mississippi State University graduate. Razzaghi moved north after graduation and discovered he no longer had a fan base to talk about his beloved Bulldog’s sports with. Together with a small team of co-workers, he launched the Fancred iPhone application in August 2012. Since then, the company has expanded to a website version. So the question is: how did they do it? How, in a digital world dominated by social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, did Fancred break through and receive over 551 ratings on iTunes, averaging 5/5 stars? Simple – they gave the people what they wanted: strictly sports. Fancred’s vision is “to be the single point of access to your life as a sports fan.” Their network allows sports fans to communicate, share, and experience sports with other die-hard fans without having to sift through friend’s newborn baby pictures on Facebook and “OMG I <3 Justin Bieber” tweets on Twitter. Here are some features that have made Fancred such a hit: Accountability – Fancred requires users to register through Facebook, thereby authenticating the user’s identity. This makes individuals accountable for the content that they post and the ways in which they interact with other users. Give Incentive – The “Fancred Score” is a genius tool that the site uses to measure how active users are. However, the score is not based on how many times a user posts; it is used to separate the true fans from the bandwagon fans. A complex algorithm that measures things including knowledge of sports, involvement in team communities (i.e. your presence in each and overall fandom, calculates the score. The Fancred Score tool is successful because it gives competitive people something to vie for, but also inevitably increases users’ presence in the site. Go Straight to the Source – College sports are a huge demographic when it comes to online communities. To help engage them, Fancred has Community Leaders at over 75 colleges across the nation, a number that is expanding every school semester. These Community Leaders are responsible for posting live updates of their school’s games, pictures, and engaging their school’s community in sports-related discussions. In turn, the community leaders receive real-world experience and school credits for an internship. Guerilla Marketing – Awareness. The Internet has grown to colossal size, making it harder for potential users to stumble upon sites. Guerilla Marketing tactics such as writing the site’s URL in giant letters across a classroom chalk board, posting cards all over campus, and, my personal favorite: eccentric displays of Fancred affection in the form of their mascots. Give Users a Goal – Unlike many other new sites that smother users with free shirts and logo-clad items, Fancred has made these items a prize. You cannot buy them; they have to be won. Fancred employees and community leaders hold “caption this picture” and “post the best X, Y, Z” competitions and offer Fancred shirts, stickers, and other coveted “cred-swag” as prizes. From its start as a mobile phone application to its expansion to a website format, Fancred is a company to be admired and studied for its clever growth tactics. Edited by Melanie Ford, Webmaster and Editor-in-Chief 2013-2014
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As I walked along the table-lined field showcasing all the organizations of Virginia Tech at Gobblerfest, the student activities fair, my freshman mind was bombarded with an overwhelming amount of opportunities. Where should I invest my time? What cause should I advocate for? Little did I know, that exactly one year from that September afternoon, I would be manning my own Gobblerfest table advocating for an organization that I had co-founded at Virginia Tech. Although it did not exist on our campus at the time, I heard about Nourish International through the PRSSA listserv. I offered to help do PR for them in order to brand Nourish on our campus, but the National Office had other things in mind: they asked me to help found the Virginia Tech Chapter and I responded with a resounding “yes!” After completing the application process and phone interview with the program director, I was welcomed into the Nourish family with open arms. For me, being given an opportunity to work towards meeting the basic necessities of human life in developing countries was a no-brainer. I believe every man, woman, and child has a right to a fighting chance at life. Since I am lucky enough to have the education and foundation that makes this endeavor possible, I am thrilled to play a role in this nationwide organization and be a part of Nourish’s biggest founding class to date (shout-out to Chapter Founders Class of 2013!). What’s unique about this student-run nonprofit is that it strives to make a long lasting impact on extreme poverty through investing in sustainable projects in destitute communities. Investments are funded by on-campus business ventures, such as our Band Together Venture. For this venture, we are selling a variety of colored elastic hair bands around Tech’s campus. After a full school year of running our business ventures, our chapter will then travel to a chosen destination the following summer and spend 6-8 weeks transforming our project from plans into a reality. For Summer 2014, Nourish International Virginia Tech plans to travel to Guatemala. While in Guatemala, we will partner with a local organization working to improve teaching methods in elementary schools, help citizens implement after school activities encouraging attendance, and teach citizens how to successfully grow a plentiful garden. This overview of Nourish International only provides a snapshot of the nonprofit’s entirety, but there are numerous integral aspects that keep this organization growing. One of these crucial features is none other than public relations. Without public relations efforts, the public will know nothing about your nonprofit. If the public knows nothing about the mission of your nonprofit, what you do, or what you advocate, I can guarantee they will be unwilling and unlikely to contribute their time or hard-earned cash towards said nonprofit. I quickly learned this alongside my co-founder, Katie Wells [pictured on Melissa's right at the Nourish International 2013 Summer Institute at UNC], as we worked to establish a general body membership, fill our executive board, and later reach out to the community of Blacksburg. If people don’t know or don’t understand what your organization is working towards, why should they care? This is where PR comes into play. Both Katie and I blew up social media with Nourish International related subjects, providing links to our mission and values as well as links to blogs written by students working abroad on previous Nourish projects. Through social media, we were able to generate interest from anyone of our Facebook friends who were scrolling through their newsfeed and stumbled across our posts. Using social media was our go-to strategy for the initial wave of PR to communicate our message to our targeted audience: Virginia Tech students. Building on this, we set up a table at the student activities fair, handed out flyers and pamphlets welcoming people to our interest meeting. For this phase of branding ourselves on campus, it was important that we had a convincing pitch perfected. The pitch had to be concise and pique an individual’s interest, all while conveying Nourish’s mission. This crucial PR element is what makes or breaks a nonprofit; it grabs people’s attention and influences them to buy into the nonprofit’s cause. After establishing a group of members, Katie and I then worked with our chapter to brand ourselves at Virginia Tech, differentiating Nourish from the other international development organizations on campus. We did this mainly through our Facebook page, giving followers updates about our latest ventures, linking them back to our mother website, and providing information about world poverty utilizing the emotional appeal, pathos. Using social media as a PR tool again, these tactics were all ways to inform our targeted audience about our endeavors and mission. Although we still have a ways to go before becoming a well-branded organization on Virginia Tech’s campus, our very first semester as a chartered club has proven to be successful thus far. Not only have we made a substantial amount of money in our business ventures, but we have also grown to 20 active members led by an executive board consisting of 8 incredibly talented students. I am eager to see how we will continue to flourish in the upcoming semesters, but it is obvious this will only be possible through the continued application on public relations. Edited by Melanie Ford, Webmaster and Editor-in-Chief 2013-2014 |
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