Influencer (INFLCR) founder and CEO Jim Cavale announced a multi-year deal with the America East Conference—INFLCR’s first conference-wide partnership.
One of the core applications of the America East-INFLCR strategy will center around conference championship events.
For example, each of the America East’s nine men’s basketball teams will receive content that they can share across their team channels, while also providing access to each team’s student-athletes to use in building their personal social-media brands within the context of the team and conference brand.
This will empower the America East conference, member universities, student-athletes and other brand ambassadors to all tell the story together on social to a much larger audience.
The INFLCR content delivery software platform will work with America East to distribute their internally-curated content (i.e. content created around team honors, student-athlete awards, highlights, conference championships, etc.) into personalized galleries on each of the mobile devices of the staff, coaches, student-athletes and other brand ambassadors of its nine member institutions.
The INFLCR mobile app will deliver each of these America East member institution brand ambassadors with the ability to access and share this content via their personal or university-based social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
America East can then use its INFLCR dashboard and usage reports to track their “audience lift” via the much-larger collective audience of those brand ambassadors.
“We’re honored and excited to the become the first conference to partner with INFLCR,” said America East Commissioner Amy Huchthausen.
“We have long emphasized the importance of creating quality content internally and recognize the strategic role social media plays in pushing out that content to tell our #3Pillars story.
We take pride in being progressive in this space and partnering with an emerging, innovative company like INFLCR will only enhance our capabilities and take us to the next level.”
Cavale said his company is excited to launch its first conference partnership and that the model being developed with America East can evolve to serve more conferences.
“America East is an ideal first conference partner because the conference and conference leadership are forward-thinking and innovative,” Cavale said.
“It’s special because we’ve always known the INFLCR content-delivery platform we’ve built could help conferences — from their championship events to weekly announcements of awards they give out to teams and student-athletes.
“The conference-level brand ambassador accounts of their teams, student-athletes, coaches, alumni, student-athlete advisory committee (SAAC) — which is a core part of the conference at the student-athlete level —are all brand-ambassador accounts of the conference that desire conference content that they can leverage for their respective brands on social. This deal just made sense.”
INFLCR is the second Stadia Ventures portfolio company to partner with the America East Conference. The first was REELY, a platform that uses AI to automatically detect and clip highlights from teams’ live stream or on demand game videos.
With clear synergies and a growing customer overlap, the companies have decided to integrate their offerings to better serve the collegiate sports market.
“Integration with REELY’s automated content services is a natural part of this partnership for America East schools already using REELY technology to cut highlights from their games. Now these REELY-generated galleries will pair with INFLCR to distribute to their brand ambassadors,” Cavale said.
“It’s exciting that Stadia Ventures, an INFLCR and REELY investor, has helped cultivate the relationship with America East Commissioner Amy Huchthausen to unify complementary technologies in a way that greatly benefits America East.”
Recently completing its first year of operations, INFLCR now serves more than 30 NCAA clients representing the America East, SEC, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, American, Mountain West, Conference USA and Sun Belt conferences.
ABOUT INFLCR
Influencer (INFLCR) is a social media CRM that allows teams and leagues to efficiently distribute their digital assets across the social channels of their most effective brand ambassadors (student-athletes, coaches, recruits prominent alumni and fans) while being able to track and measure the reach and performance of the content at scale via a convenient dashboard. With INFLCR, teams can store, share and track their digital assets (game photos, videos, etc.) as they flow through the social media channels of their brand ambassadors. Learn more at inflcr.com
ABOUT THE AMERICA EAST CONFERENCE
Headquartered in Boston, the America East Conference consists of nine universities competing in 18 NCAA Division I varsity sports. The America East provides its member schools and their athletic programs a platform upon which student-athletes can achieve both collegiate and life success through the promotion and nurturing of athletic excellence, academic achievement and leadership, on and off the field. Member institutions include Albany University, Binghamton University, Hartford University, University of Maine, the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, the University of New Hampshire, Stony Brook University and the University of Vermont. Learn more at americaeast.com.
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