Thus far our journey has shown us #10 Creighton.
Let's keep moving.
#9 Evansville
The Digital Scouting Report
Strengths: Well done presence on YouTube that extends into their Facebook page.
Weaknesses: This YouTube experience doesn't hit the athletics site at all, and information on this year's program is tough to come by.
Full Scouting Report:I wasn't quite sure what to expect with the Evansville website. Evansville stood alone for awhile, as the program who hit the court with everyone wearing t-shirt jerseys. Would they stand alone in the digital world? When I hit the Purple Aces home page, here, I was quickly drawn to a Facebook and Twitter icon in the bottom right hand corner of the home page.
As you can see here, the Facebook and Twitter icons rotate in and out.
As you can likely guess, I'm not a fan of that -- we need to make it easy to follow our programs and thus should give permanent places for those ways. Clicking into follow the Aces on Facebook takes you here, to a community of 662.
It's not the largest or most active community, but Evansville does do a nice job of sharing videos on YouTube and then including them inside their Facebook page (see the image below). I like this a lot, as it both expands their audience for videos and it makes it easy for them to share.
Evansville also has a YouTube page for these videos, here. As you will see, they are extremely active, posting videos across all sports - postgame interviews and coaches shows. They do a really nice job getting this out there quickly after games, with the biggest opportunity being to find a way to allow for subscribing for your favorite sport.
Next, I checked out the Aces on Twitter, here. At 196 followers, Evansville does a solid job reporting on all sports, giving you a little bit of insight along with the game updates, like this:
"Kaylan Martin leading UEWBB at the break with 7 pts. UE shooting just 25.0 percent though."While it's solid though, I don't feel the most potential comes from general athletics updates. Recruits are recruits for one sport and we need to enable them to select the content they want. So in this case, that means hoops content by itself -- keep the volleyball updates separated from this experience!
Scrolling down to the bottom of the page, you'll see Evansville gives a summary of ways to follow the program. This is pretty solid...
First, you can see that they give access into Facebook and Twitter plus they have a mobile site. To me, this is incredibly important as they are creating a way for prospective student athletes to take the Aces with them. I haven't seen many mobile sites (West Virginia has a nice one). Nice.
As you can see below, the Aces also offer ways to follow the program via student Blogs, Chats (coming soon), and a Q&A with the Athletics Director.
Unfortunately, there isn't a hoops student athlete blog. But, as you can see below, they have the infrastructure ready to do just this. This is something they need to have, as it could be a difference maker.
So in that search for hoops content, I moved on to the basketball home page, here. You'll note the same Twitter call out in the bottom right, though it doesn't go to a basketball Twitter presence...
On the right hand side, they do offer easy access to Live Audio streaming of games (free) and Live Video Streaming (pay).
Evansville has their Hoops Media Guide available to download in a series of PDFs. I'm not a fan of this approach, on many levels. You have to download this to look at it. And you have to download multiple files. And there's really not a lot of description or visual into what you are going to get if you do this.
Finally, it's text and simple but I did like the Coaching Staff directory, shown below. At a glance you get every coach, their phone, and their email. Make it easy to connect...
So the access is here, but there is a gap in providing information on this year's squad. Come back tomorrow...
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