Colonial Athletic Association Best Practices: Towson and LinkedIn

This blog is all about inspiration. Today we start with 3 days elevating best practices from the squads that make up the CAA. You can tune in on this blog, or you can follow along on Facebook (linked here) or on Twitter -- I'm @pawlow34.

What makes something a best practice? This isn't about the most intricate experience. It's about looking at the world from your consumer's point of view and delivering something that hits it right smack on the head. For this work, I'm treating the primary consumer as that prospective student athlete.

Thus far we've seen Hofstra Bring in the Energy from Facebook, here.

Let's keep moving.

Hit the Towson Athletics page and you'll see the humongous callout for LinkedIn near the top of the page (shown below), with an intriguing sub-header ("For Student-Athlete Career Support"). Very intrigued, I clicked in..

Clicking in takes us here, to the Towson University Varsity Club. The description on this page says it all:

"Division I athletes know how to handle pressure, they work long and hard in the field/court/pool and in the classroom. They make us proud wearing the black and gold, so lets help them get to the next level after graduation. Refer a Tiger."

Nice.

So, what we have here is the athletics department trying to connect alums (with connections) to current student-athletes in an effort to help them land a job after their time on campus is complete. This is something that is often not clear until you are a graduating (or recently graduated) senior -- that your alumni network can greatly help you in finding a job. And these networks are radically different between universities.

What Towson is doing is showing student-athletes that they are trying -- by giving a very prominent space away to help make this connection. And this creates an invaluable resource for their student-athletes (and for prospective student-athletes who can see the big picture).

How could this be better? I'd love to see content delivered to connect with this concept. Perhaps it's a list of student-athletes (alums) by function in the working world. Or maybe it is recognizing one alum each month for what they've accomplished. In any case, find a way to elevate this idea of life after Towson and then let that serve as a launching point for the LinkedIn connection. Don't get me wrong - the LinkedIn piece is smart... there is just an opportunity to take this insight and build it into something bigger that really elevates the Towson Athletics brand.

Tune in tomorrow as we share more inspiration from the CAA! And, don't forget, you can follow along on Facebook (here) or on Twitter: I'm @pawlow34.

Andy