The athletic department at the University of Texas is big business. But don’t take my word for it. At the end of last year, CNBC said it was the most valuable athletic department in the country at a $1.48 billion valuation.
Rob Novak, the CFO for Texas Athletics, said that because of the department’s scale, revenue victories come in much more incremental ways. So when Texas found a platform that became the mesh for its customer data and supported sales for women’s basketball ticket sales growth, it was a staggering boost. “To be sold out in all six ticketed sports is the dream, from a fan engagement perspective and from a brand and affinity deal,” Novak said of the aspiration, a grouping that also includes football, volleyball, men’s basketball, baseball, and softball.
Texas is closer than ever to that with the help of Equipe, a data infrastructure startup that emerged publicly in February with the announcement of a $1.5 million investment from Roger Ehrenberg’s Game Changers Ventures.
The main mission of Equipe, founded by Nick Benson and Sajan Gutta, is to turn its customer data platform into a super highway for the various data silos and create golden fan records (a record that the entire tech stack defaults to) for college sports operators. This is a problem many are trying to tackle across the entire industry, but it’s especially tricky in college, where the term “fan” can encompass single-game buyers, season-ticket holders, alumni, donors, and boosters.
The company spent the last year working in stealth at the best proving ground in college athletics, a process that helped to level set the platform for business. “The first few months and even today, there’s always new things that you’re discovering and having to iterate on,” Gutta said. “We try and iterate on our product as fast as possible, and figure that the more we improve it – and the speed we improve it at – it’s going to end up being able to solve every issue they have in the long run.”
Turning a cold outreach into hot sales leads
Equipe’s connection to Texas actually started via cold outreach, which landed in the inbox of a now-departed employee (Craig Tigges, currently CFO at Arkansas). That came at a time when Texas needed a more nimble solution around its data. Ultimately, an official RFP process took place where Equipe outshone others, Novak shared, and the parties went to work.
The biggest help for Texas, both Novak and Assistant AD of Finance Jack Luddy shared, came via Equipe’s segmentation and customized search capabilities. Novak says the financial office now has the speed to get info quickly to the ticketing office or development team so they can act on that data quickly instead of waiting a day or more for reports.
“It’s almost that customer’s Wikipedia page,” Luddy added. “What about them? What have they done in the past? What games have they attended? What can we do for them in the future?”
That view helped the athletics department grow its women’s basketball season ticket holders. When the basketball programs moved from the Frank Erwin Center to the Moody Center ahead of the 2022-23 season, Novak said only 1,700 women’s season ticket holders carried over. Now, after years of work, plus this enhanced effort with Equipe lately, that number has ballooned to more than 6,000. Novak expects to hit that sixth sold-out sport next year, boosted by back-to-back Final Four runs for the women’s program.
To do it, Texas converted people who were infrequent attendees (maybe they only attended marquee games) or were on other sports’ waitlists, just wanting to be a steady presence around Texas athletics. Equipe made those discoveries much easier to sift through.
“There’s a ton of folks that want our kids to succeed and making sure that we know who they are and we’re stewarding them appropriately – thanking them for attending the game, making sure we get a fan survey, making sure we act on those fan surveys, making sure we have activation before the event,” Novak said. “All of those things are so important to Chris [Del Conte, Texas athletic director] on building the brand, building the experience, building the affinity, and this gave us the data to back it up.”
