In terms of events that work, we know that there’s typically the main event, but there also needs to be something before and something after. This seems like a simple formula, but it’s not easy to pull off. However, if you can get it right and have some lead-up to the event that’s more than just a pre-game ceremony—perhaps something like tailgating at a sporting event, which most people are familiar with—then you’re on the right track with your event.

It can either be organized tightly or loosely, but there just needs to be something to attend before the main event. And then, once you get to the main event, it’s on. The game is on, but then you’ve also got to leave people with something as they depart, because we know from plenty of research that as important as first impressions are, final impressions are important as well. Walking out of the event needs to be a pretty good experience to go along with it, so that people leave with that last thing in their minds, and know that they’ve had a good time.

Managing crowds at sports venues seems like it would be something pretty simple, but that’s also not necessarily true. Think about any time you’ve been to an event and it’s been easy to move around, maybe compared to a different event where it’s been tough to move around. A classic example is Disney World.

If you’ve ever been to Disney World, think about all of the people who were there on the same day, at the same time, trying to get into the same activities, and the same rides, and the same shows. But at Disney, as long as you stand in line, they’ve got it pretty well figured out. Nowhere is going to be perfect, but they’ve got it pretty well figured out how to treat people and make you believe that you’re having a good and magical time, even when you’re doing something tedious like standing in line.

These are all the things that the better examples in sports venues are figuring out as well. If you’re going to stand there, you may be on your smartphone to pass the time, but that’s not really what the sports franchises want you to be doing. The better ones figure out good ways to keep you involved, keep you engaged, and keep you a part of what’s going on.

Do you have interest in sports management concepts and strategies, or global sports trends? If so, give online sports management education a try, as it’s the most accessible form of sports management education that you’ll find to learn about how to keep people engaged and interested when attending an event.

Within the ecosystem of sports, the trend is about using them to build a community. Initially, you couldn’t have expected that just by putting an arena and a team in a city it would change the community and economic landscape. It just didn’t seem likely.

In the 1980s and early ’90s, the city of Arlington, Texas, the city of Baltimore, Maryland, and the city of Cleveland, Ohio, put arenas and stadiums into their communities. They did this with the idea that their communities would be improved by having sports facilities. And in some cases, this does work. But in some cases, it just doesn’t, and it takes cataclysmic emphasis to get development to occur.

The way this is happening in the current environment is that developers are not only building sports facilities and arenas in the communities, but they’re also building all of the other components that go along with them. They’re building housing, restaurants, theaters, shopping, parking, and mixed-use commercial developments. They’re doing this to catalyze the communities, and to do it in a way where sports are part of it, and maybe even at the center of it, but aren’t necessarily the only part of it that’s generating community emphasis and changing the community landscape.

Barclay’s Center in New York is a great example of this. Before that building was constructed, Atlantic Yards was part of Downtown Brooklyn. But now, there’s shopping there, and multi-modal transportation elements. Then there’s the arena, which holds hundreds of events each year. This brings people to a community gathering place. If it weren’t for the transportation and the shopping that was also included, and it was only the arena, it might not have the same impact.

To learn more about these concepts and the world of global sports and sports management, consider participating in sports management education. Additionally, with online sports management education, you can save money and learn without even having to leave home.

When you understand social conditions, you can make what is just a sporting event into a societal event or moment–a place where everybody can plug in. Only in sports can you do that. When you do that, you’re doing more than pushing society forward. I’ll take you back to the early 1900s, where there was a problem in the United States.

They were trying to figure out what to do with the orphans, sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters of the Native Americans who had been slaughtered in the conquering of Native American tribes and nations. There was a big debate in those states: “What do we do?” “Do we put them in schools?” “Do we keep them on reservations?”

And so schools started popping up. Not well resourced, but there was one school called the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. There was a great football coach with plenty of experience in sports management and sports management education named Pop Warner who had been coaching at Cornell and other top football institutions at the time. He was a difficult guy, and he had crazy ideas about how football should be played. Nobody wanted to listen to him. He was too strong in his opinions, too progressive in his ideas, and a bit of a free thinker. Pop went and took the job to coach the underresourced Carlisle Indians. They had very little money, terrible fields, and no equipment.

Warner happened to have some talented kids. One of them was named Jim Thorpe. Pop started teaching them all these crazy ways of playing football, which we now know are the state of the game such as the forward pass, the misdirection, and the fake. Things that people just thought were either dishonorable or too complicated to understand.

Pop kept winning with this ragtag group of Native American kids and kept telling the press, “These kids can beat any team in the country, especially the other undefeated team, West Point.” West Point had a star halfback and linebacker named Dwight Eisenhower. But what Pop was talking about to his players and the subscript to the whole thing was not, “Oh, I have a way of football that you really need to understand.”

That’s interesting, but not so interesting to many people other than people who were interested in this new sport called football, so when Pop Warner is talking to his kids, and he’s saying, “Listen, we’re not about to just play a football game. We’re about to re-enact the Calvary versus the Indians. We’re about to give you the chance to go out there, and compete, and hit, and vanquish those who vanquished your people.” When a person takes a social condition like that and layers it over top of an athletic event where people can actually watch the competitors who represent the opposing social issues go at it, the power of sports becomes a moment of such societal focus.

The influence of global sports on society can’t be underestimated. Sports are not just an escape from the real world, but they are also a powerful force shaping how people interact in the real world and the kind of rights we afford to different groups of people. For example, women’s rights have largely been shaped by the sports world whereas sports had often been dominated just by men going back to the beginning of the modern Olympics in the early 1900s.

It was expected that only men should compete because women were too delicate to be able to actually participate in sports. And so it wasn’t until really the 1920s that women were competing seriously in the Olympics. But even then, women still weren’t taken that seriously at the time. We fast forward to moments, like in the 1960s when the marathon was still very much a men-only kind of activity. The Boston Marathon was the pinnacle of marathons across the world. Kathrine Switzer chose to run the Boston Marathon despite all kinds of negative pushback from society and her community. She had to run with a cadre of men around her, including her boyfriend, with people throwing things at her. An official of the race actually tried to drag her off the course, and there is a brilliant photo of her boyfriend physically handling that official down to the ground so that his girlfriend could keep running the race.

And for the girls watching at home, this is a life-changing thing. When talking to marathoners today in their 50s or 60s, they’ll say, “The only reason I thought this was possible is that I saw Kathrine Switzer do this when I was growing up.” And Switzer is still running marathons today in her 70s. The impact of the game itself can be elaborated on in online sports management education.

One of the customers of global sports analytics data is the media. Sports organizations sell the rights to media organizations who broadcast or telecast the games on TV, on mobile devices, over the internet, et cetera. And one of the ways to present this game is the classic way it’s been presented on television for years, or to provide some of this data and insight that we have now that we didn’t have 10 or 15 years ago to the fan in the form of information.

Oftentimes in sports broadcasting today, you’ll hear something referred to as the “second screen.” And what that means is something that augments and supplements the traditional telecast of a game. We might be watching a basketball game when we’ve got the home team announcers, and we’ve got the regular feed that we’re seeing on TV, which covers the court. It might isolate a couple of players, and it usually follows the ball. However, we might also have something available to us, perhaps on an iPad, to watch on a second screen while we’re watching the game. Not instead of or independent of it, but concurrently. And so, we can iterate back and forth between the iPad or the television screen. And what the iPad is delivering you on that second screen is a lot richer data and information. So, it might be telling you shooting percentages of players as they’re running up and down the court from the position that they are in the court.

Now, the key is to not just present raw data to fans or inundate them and take away from their enjoyment of the game but to integrate this information in such a way that it can add to the enjoyment of the game. But you have to realize that there are different types of fans. There are fans who want the traditional, no-frills broadcast, if you will, where there’s an announcer talking to them without a lot of data and information. And then there are other people-oftentimes the younger generation-who also want to see all the data and information. Oftentimes what we’re seeing is we’re seeing this delivered on a second screen.

So, yes, there’s a traditional broadcast, perhaps on your TV. But on your iPad, you can watch a data-laden telecast or transmission of the game. And when we get to augmented reality, we might even be able to see stats superimposed on the shirts of the athletes. For example, we might see someone going up to take a three-point shot with the shooting percentage they have from that spot on the court.

So, this is the kind of enrichment that some fans will love and really help them understand the game better or just enjoy the game more. And other fans will say, “no, please! I don’t really want this!” So this is how media companies have to be very careful in how they take this to market. It might even be getting some biometric data someday where we basically see their heart rate, or we see their hydration levels. There is all sorts of information that can be delivered on a second screen. It’s just a matter of understanding what the fan is looking for and what would help enrich the game to the fan.

We’ve just discussed this important area of sports data and analytics. And one of the most important things to remember is that in this era of abundant information and data, it’s critical that you understand how to incorporate this information into decision processes. What insights can you mine from this information that can impact the probability of making a better decision in sports management? That’s really what it’s all about.

There are a variety of contracts that sports teams enter into aside from player contracts, and players contracts are, for the most part, defined by the collective bargaining agreements. But there are other contracts such as lease agreements with facilities, key sponsorship agreements with vendors, and also short-term contracts to bring other sports or transitory sports into their building.

It’s all about making sure that the facility and the player or the promoter are also able to make money in those contracts and also allow for the fan to enjoy the experience. Sometimes, you will have somebody playing there for just two weeks at a time.

In Houston, for instance, the Houston Texans have a 30-year contract with their stadium, which is Energy Stadium. And they play their full football season there. Whether that building is usable or not, they have what’s called a “hell or high water” lease there. No matter what, they’re actually duty-bound to keep playing in that building.

If the building’s unusable, they can play elsewhere until the building’s fixed. However, they are duty-bound to stay in that stadium for 30 years. It’s a non-relocation agreement and one which teams and venues take very seriously because 30 years is a long time.

They also have another tenant in that building that probably not a lot of people know about. That tenant is the Houston Livestock and Rodeo show. They play there for two weeks, roughly, each year. What they do is a lot of music events and livestock shows, and they use the whole Energy campus—not just the stadium, but also the Astrodome, the Arena Astro Hall, and the Astro Arena.

So during these two weeks each year, the entire property is basically consumed by the Houston Livestock and Rodeo show, and they also have a long-term agreement. But they’re usually using multiple venues within that whole Astro domain. And the entire situation is complex. How they use it, and how they are contracted with their landlord is a complex negotiation but also has a lot to do with how they view their fans using the building as well.

If you pursue online sports management education, you can learn much more about how contracts between venues and teams work as well as a number of global sports and sports management related topics. If you’re interested in a sports management education, there’s no reason you need to wait any longer to get started.

Sometimes in sports management education, you may look at the ways in which social media has changed the sports world.

When you start to segment certain groups of individuals, you start to get a specific target market. And in having any given target market, you better understand your objectives. If I know that I’m going after any particular group of individuals, I can do my research on those individuals. I can start to understand their preferences, their needs, their wants, their goals as consumers.

You can start to understand how they would like to interact with the team, as well as what they don’t like. So, you can not only understand their likes and dislikes, but also have targeted marketing efforts that are specifically catered to that group.

What we’re seeing nowadays is that with the advent of social media and its growing popularity, a lot of sports teams are starting to utilize different social media mediums to communicate with different groups of fans. So, whereas the only social media in the past was Facebook, and Facebook would send out mass messages to a number of different audiences, now we have Facebook, we have Twitter, we have Snapchat, we have Instagram. We have a number of different mediums to reach each and every one of these demographics.

Studies will show, obviously, that certain demographics are on certain social media mediums more often than not. For instance, a younger generation is likely to be on Instagram, and the older generation is likely to be on Facebook. So in terms of segmenting the market, and in terms of reaching each and every individual market with genuine messages, you would therefore want to utilize the social media mediums that they are gravitating towards to send out your messages.

For example, if you wanted to speak to an older group, you would get on Facebook to send a message. However, if you wanted to speak to a younger group, not only would you get on Instagram to send a message, but you would also perhaps integrate a message in a different way. You would maybe try to do it in a way through Instagram that can speak towards that younger generation.

With Facebook, you’ll typically see somewhat bland messages. You won’t see too many particularly vibrant messages there that are given to fans. This is because with the older audience, although it’s not as if they don’t like vibrant messages, it’s just more that the slightly bland ones tend to be the messages that speak to them. So, it will typically be somewhat bland and general announcements, perhaps simply stating that tickets are on sale or playoff tickets are coming on sale. Just bland, generic announcements like that.

On the other hand, it’s very different when any given team is interacting with the consumer on Twitter or Instagram. On Twitter, for example, they wouldn’t just give these general messages or announcements. For instance, if it was the Golden State Warriors, instead of simply stating that tickets are on sale, they will perhaps tweet during a game that “things are lit right now” to kind of speak to that younger fan base.

Ultimately, it’s not even about the fact that they’re promoting a given promotion or ticket sale. It’s more about wanting to use these mediums to speak to the audience so that you can, in a way, be on the same level with them. And once you’re on that same level, you can start to interact with that consumer differently, and they start to eventually form what is somewhat of a trusting relationship.

To learn more about the way social media is changing the world of local, national, and global sports, as well as many more topics relating to sports management, think about giving online sports management education a try.

A brand, you might say, is a given symbol, term, logo, or combination thereof that represents the entity at hand. Sports teams are very unique in the brand sphere. They’re very different in the fact that they’re not a mere product. They’re intangible, and a lot of the time when consumers are interacting with a product in comparison to a brand, with the product, they don’t have a say in it.

When a consumer interacts with a global sports brand, it’s subjective in nature, whereas with a product, they just go purchase it and get out of it whatever they had in mind to purchase. A subjective lens toward sports brands would be the idea that you can go to a sporting event and possibly get something different each and every time.

Each and every consumer is going to engage differently with a sports brand, and because of this, the brands are particularly unique. Teams have to emphasize their brand rather than the product because the product is what’s on the field. To be honest, though, the field isn’t going to be reliable: In any given league, there could be 30 different teams playing. In any given season, there can only be one winner. Therefore, the other 29 or so teams are, essentially, losers.

As a result, there’s only one ‘good’ product, which isn’t necessarily what you’ll hear when you’re studying sports management. The thing is, the teams wouldn’t be doing themselves any favors by basing their marketing on the fact that their team (AKA their product) is going to be a quality product. Logically, then, they have to market on outside extensions. They have to market on the brand itself.

To this end, the brand — the team — will work to have their larger organization, their own brand, take on a certain personality. Online sports management education courses might focus on making a stronger winning team, but it’s the brand’s personality that has the ability to speak to consumers. Consumers can interact with that personality rather than relying on the product that’s on the field. Sports management education’s emphasis on winning isn’t a detriment, either: that’s important, too! The brand needs to be well-rounded so it doesn’t rely on only one aspect of the product.

If you wanted to approach a branding concept or project without knowing much about the subject, using a generic stadium or team, you would need to rely heavily on your research. It isn’t so much about the demographic information, about the average age or typical income of the consumer. What you really want to rely on are the psychographics of the consumer. You want to look at what they like and what they dislike.

For example, are they into extreme sports? Are they into mountain climbing or that sort of activity? What you’re trying to find are certain psychological attributes that speak towards a particular brand characteristic. Once you find that brand characteristic, or any of the psychological attributes that the consumers value in their lives outside of sports, the next step would be trying to represent that value to your given sports team.

For example, if we look at the Miami Heat NBA team, Miami has a strong Hispanic base of population, which represents a huge amount of their consumers. Knowing this, and knowing that they value their Hispanic heritage, the team will sometimes wear different, Hispanic-themed jerseys. This is a way to not only market something on the court but to also market something that the consumers will really value.

It all ties in with researching the psychographics of your consumer. It’s about taking certain characteristics that you discover over the course of that research and implementing them into what the team stands for and what the team represents. However, it’s important to keep in mind that psychographics isn’t the same as demographics.

Demographics are typically relatively black and white categories. For example, some demographic characteristics could be income, gender, or race. These are things that are pretty straightforward and objective. Psychographics, on the other hand, try to take into consideration the psychological makeup of a given consumer, as well as their attitudes in terms of what they like and dislike, and potentially even things like what colors they prefer. Instead of just their basic backgrounds, psychographic consider the particular likes and preferences of their consumers, which have to do more with their mindset.

More information about the way sports teams connect specifically with their consumers, as well as many other useful lessons regarding global sports, sports management, and more, can be learned with online sports management education. Going the online route allows you to conveniently attain the sports management education that you’re after without breaking the bank.

The topic of stadiums and how they’ve evolved to increase the fan experience is an enormous one, one that, I might spend three or four sessions in my classes just talking about fandom and how people enjoy the experience of being in a stadium. The question that most teams ask is, how can they get people to enjoy the game as much in the stadium as they would on their couch at home? With high-definition televisions and beautiful furniture in their homes, sometimes it’s hard to get people off the couch and coming to the game, so how do you do that?

Well, you provide an experience for them that is unparalleled, that is a live sports experience like no other, and you do it in a way where people enjoy getting to the stadium, enjoy the pre-game festivities, and enjoy the fact that they can socialize with their friends both through their mobile devices and physically in the stands. That’s how you keep people connected and coming to the venues, and it means there’s a variety of seating possibilities.

These days, it’s no longer just going to the stadium and sitting in the stands, where there’s 100,000 people sitting in either the lower deck or upper deck. Instead, you’ve got six to 10 varieties of seating arrangements that people can avail themselves of and make themselves comfortable. They can come with friends; they can come individually; they can stand. There are different places to get food, there’s ethnic food, and there’s a variety of different entertainment that happens during the game.

Then, if you happen to step into the concourses, the game’s still on there with lots of TVs (and even multiple screens for fantasy sports). Having all of this gets you coming to the building to enjoy a wide variety of experiences. In a way, it’s almost like having three screens while you’re at a live event.

If you’d like to learn more about how sports and their venues are changing and evolving, as well as many other global sports and sports management-related topics and lessons, give online sports management education a try. If you want a sports management education, there’s no reason you shouldn’t take the first steps now to start learning online.

There have been many different examples of sports venues, arenas, and stadiums in different communities, and as it tends to be with anything, there are examples when they have worked to improve the community and examples when they haven’t. However, it’s always good to focus on the positives and strengths and the examples of good things that have happened.

All you have to do is look back through history, and you’ll see many examples of people coming together through sports. It’s part of just about any civilization. If you think about your wildest dreams of where you’d like to travel, and consider distant, far-off places, there’s a very good chance that somewhere along that trip you would come across some sort of a sports venue or complex.

One amazing, famous example is the Colosseum in Rome. For the people who lived in that place and time, it served as a main gathering place. For the most part, that hasn’t really changed between then and now. Our sports venues still serve as gathering places for the people in our cities and communities. Granted, they sometimes cost a little bit more money to access than some of the other places we might gather, but they truly are designed for the community aspect.

These venues are designed to grow communities. They’re designed to make people feel better about where they live, to improve their quality of life, and to help give them things that we’re all looking for, such as happiness.

One of the tough things about building sports venues is that they tend to cost quite a bit of money. And, no matter how much a team or franchise or private business is contributing to it, there is at some point going to end up being some public cost. There just isn’t much getting around it. That being said, in a large number of cases, it ends up being worth the cost. When done right, and when done with the community in mind and starting out in the community, it may take some time, but usually, good things tend to happen.

For more information about the pros and cons of sporting venues, sports management strategies, global sports marketing, and many other concepts, give online sports management education a chance. It’s by far the most convenient way to access sports management education, and it may just be a great fit for you.