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I recently read an interesting article about women’s sports in a late October issue of SportsBusiness Journal. I felt the need to give my thoughts on the subject, especially as they relate to building and activating a community and combining that strategy with the essence of localism in women’s sports. These are things I’ve been preaching to folks for the past two years, but it’s refreshing to see it pull through in SBJ. The article is called, “When selling women’s sports, know your fans and your city.”

First, I think the article is spot-on when saying consumer engagement, i.e., creating an actual consumer interaction with a brand (vs. flat sponsorship) is key in activating the female space. I can’t emphasize this enough. Don’t just purchase signs. Sure you want to be visible, but do something else that really creates word of mouth and extends beyond the meek numbers in the stadium. Start to think deeper – understand the bigger picture.

Building a community is critical

Nobody can dispute this fact – female athletes are INCREDIBLE to interact with, and so are the fast-growing consumer population that has participated in sport in the past 30 years (thanks to Title IX). Not to mention, on the business side, we’re seeing a flurry of AWESOME female executives at major sports brands and leagues.

Someone needs to create a community and facilitate interactions between these people. From our experiences with WomenTalkSports.com, the essence of a community is the long-tail differentiator for success in a female sports publication. We continue to grow our traffic every month, and actually excel during key women’s sports events.

But we’re only a fraction of the way there. We are largely grassroots and quite frankly lack the resources right now to push our site to the next level. But what we do have is a community of advocates, and honestly, this core community has driven every bit of word-of-mouth that we’ve received.

In order to make a HUGE impact in women’s sports, we think a big company needs to come in, build partnerships and form a much larger community. Its members, over time, will drive success in all areas of women’s sports (including selling products, driving tune-in and putting “butts in seats”). Nobody has done this on a marco level… yet.

However, I think there’s hope, and it might be right around the corner. espnW could be the answer.

The newly-emerging group at ESPN is building a platform for female athletes and female sports fans. It’s going to launch as a blog this fall and grow into a full website in the spring.

espnW put on a great retreat in San Diego, inviting brand managers, bloggers, media, athletes, coaches and business executives together for a few days and get excited about the new business. I blogged about the experience when I got back – you should check it out if you haven’t already. As far as I can tell, this is one of the only times that any company has ever taken the lead in actually proactively bringing influencers in the women’s sports space together for the sole purpose of meeting each other. And I was honestly honored to be a part of it.

The espnW retreat went really, really well. The team accomplished their mission of building brand ambassadors prior to launch within the core group of women’s sports advocates. Not only did they do an amazing job on-site (every detail was taken care of), but in many ways, just by bringing the group people together, the community really drove itself.

Attendees now not only feel a part of the espnW community, but also have a much a stronger affinity with the brands and their executives that were there. The key for espnW will now be in activating a call to action, answering two key questions - what do we want these people to do for us, and how do we maintain this core group and grow it online? After all, the passionate women and men at the retreat are only a fraction of those who exist all around the world. And this doesn’t even include the “female sports fan” community, which they’re also targeting.

The Local Opportunity

The Women's Flat Track Derby Association is sustained locally. This is their call-to-action button.

Another key to success, which not a lot of people talk about, will be activating at the local level. Unfortunately, since we over at WomenTalksSports.com are a three-man shop plus volunteers, we don’t have the resources to produce quality editorial on the local level. But if we did, we strongly believe there’s a lot of success to be had.

Local activation in the women’s sports scene is a wide open space. I have had many long talks with Marie Hardin at Penn State about problems in women’s sports journalism, and something she mentioned to me a few weeks ago has really stuck out in my mind. Local publications do really, really well in covering women’s sports. They don’t fail. And they actually have a nice steady stream of local advertising that supports them.

Marie credits this trend to the essence of local news reporting – local newspaper editors hire actual reporters that proactively cover women’s high school and college sports in their areas. Because the female participation rates are so high, a local community exists to sustain and support the coverage. Local advertisers help to support that business model.

We also see that same thing happen in female sports that are community driven. Take for instance the Independent Women’s Football League, or the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association. These leagues sustain themselves through membership/participation fees and local sponsorships. But even beyond that, each league has its own community. Women participate and people attend games because of the interaction and experience they receive. Those on the national level can actually learn from their success.

My point with this post is that someone needs to step up to the plate and put these winning ingredients together. Cross-partnerships are important, and those in the women’s sports industry in any capacity need to start coming together and working together. We need a national platform to step up and build this community, facilitate interactions and activate at the local level.

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