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Untitled
eCommSports Kit Curriculum Guide
Step 3 Supplement
Business Plan Template (Instructor Version)
(Note to teacher: The Student Version of this document does not include any of the information that appears in italics. We will use the Lincoln High School Boys Varsity Basketball Team demo site to provide the example content for the instructor version of the Business Plan Template.)
What is the name of your company?
What does your company expect to accomplish as a result of this project? Include specific and measurable goals.
This section of the business plan should answer these questions:
What services will your company be providing during this project? Which school sports team will serve as your company’s client during this project? What will be the key benefits this team receives from your company’s services? How will you know if your company’s efforts on behalf of this team were successful? How will you accurately measure that success?
Our company will provide marketing and promotional services and assistance to the Lincoln High School Boys Varsity Basketball Team that will result in an increase in the number of people who attend the team’s home games during this year’s season.
Last season, average attendance, according to the ticket sales receipts, was about 250 people per game. Our company’s goal will be to increase average attendance to 350 people per game, an increase of 40%.
In addition, our company will be committed to conducting ourselves at all times in a legal, completely ethical, and highly professional manner so that when the project has been completed, our school, our families, and our community will be proud of what we’ve accomplished and how we accomplished it.
Who is your market for this project?
This section of your plan should answer this question:
We will direct our efforts at the following groups of people:
Students in our school - (list quantity) Staff in our school - (list quantity) Students and staff of all other schools in our community - (list approximate quantity) People living in our community/school district - (list total population)
What strategies will you use to persuade more of your market to attend the team’s games?
We will build greater awareness of the team among the target market. We will actively promote and make it easier than ever for the target market to find out the times, date, and location of each game. We will plan and promote special fan participation activities and contests to provide people with additional incentives for attending the games.
What resources and techniques will your company use to implement these strategies?
Will you do any branding? Will you use a Web site? What other types of in-school advertising can be considered? How about trying to get some free publicity? How can you get other Web sites to help? Any chance of finding some partners from outside your classroom to help you? What about something to make people who attend the games feel special?
We will design, create, and maintain an official eCommSports Web site for the team and use the site as our primary means of communicating with our marketplace. A site plan will be attached to this Business Plan at a later date. We will create inserts for our school’s morning announcements that remind students and staff of game dates, report game results, promote special events and activities and drive traffic to the Web site on a school-wide basis. As appropriate, similar announcements will be distributed to other school buildings. We will write and distribute press releases and letters to the editor describing this project, promoting the team, and driving traffic to the Web site on a community-wide basis. We will seek a business partnership with this team’s booster club to help us obtain and update content for the Web site and promote the team. (If a booster club does not exist, consider forming a similar partnership with parents and/or friends of team members and coaching staff of team.) We will create and promote a fan club for the team and make game attendance mandatory for membership. We will ask all fan club members to join the Web sites mailing list so we can communicate with them via e-mail. We will plan at least one fan participation activity to take place at a future game and then promote the activity, heavily.
What kind of workers will your company need to implement this plan and what types of skills will these workers need?
Our company will create four work teams or departments to complete our plan.
Marketing Team
The Marketing Team will be responsible for developing a strategy for building school-wide and community-wide interest in this team plus planning and promoting the special events and activities necessary to entice more people to attend the team’s games. This team needs workers who think that they would enjoy a career in sales, advertising, marketing, or public relations. Workers on this team should enjoy communicating with all types and ages of people and not be easily discouraged if their initial efforts are unsuccessful. Workers on this team will be coming up with team slogans; designing and writing press releases; preparing commercial inserts for your school’s morning announcements; creating promotional copy and selling site ads (if you intend to permit ad sales to local businesses and organizations as part of your project); designing posters; etc. This team will also decide how to integrate the site’s mailing list into the marketing strategy. For example, will they send an e-mail message to the entire list each game-day to remind visitors of the time, place, opponent, and special activities scheduled for that day’s game?
Web Site Content Team
The Web site Content Team will be responsible for creating and obtaining all of the content that will appear at the team’s eCommSports Web site. This team will work with the Web site Operations Team to create a site plan that specifically describes what content and which eCommSports site features will be located on each page of the site. This team will then do whatever needs to be done to obtain the content necessary to put that plan into action. This could include writing site copy, as well as negotiating and forming partnerships with other work teams, school groups, classes, or individuals in your school to do so. Since photos will be needed as content for your site, this team will also need to figure out how to obtain these digital images. Another important function of this team will be to make sure all content appearing at the site is grammatically correct and spell-checked. This team needs workers who think that they would enjoy careers in publishing or journalism. This is also an excellent team choice for students who love to write or take pictures.
Web Site Operations Team
This team will be responsible for working with the Web site Content Team to develop the eCommSports site plan. They will be the team responsible for getting all of the content posted at the site. This will be the team that is responsible for making sure your site looks good at all times and operates the way it is supposed to. For example, this team will make sure all of the links included at the site work exactly the way they’re intended to work. They will make sure the photos and graphics at your site are properly sized so that they appear at their sharpest level and load quickly. They will maintain the site’s mailing list membership and distribute any e-mailings to the list. They will monitor site traffic and page popularity on a regular basis and report their findings to all other teams. Even though workers on this team require no HTML or computer experience to easily master the eCommSports SiteBuilder Wizards, members of this team should enjoy working with computers and be those considering careers in IT (information technology), Web site design, graphic design, or market research and statistical analysis.
Management Team
This team’s primary responsibility will be to make sure your company has the resources necessary to fulfill its primary business mission. This team will be responsible for documenting your business plan and monitoring your company’s performance versus the goals established in the plan. If performance lags and targets are being missed, it will be the Management Team that leads the effort to analyze what is going wrong and modify the plan accordingly. The Management Team will be responsible for making sure the work teams are coordinated to communicate and interact with each other in a productive way. The Management Team will be responsible for making sure your company and all of its workers conduct themselves at all times in a legal, completely ethical, and highly professional manner. The Management Team will have final control of all company communications, including all site content. Students considering careers in business management, teaching, law, and public administration should consider working on this team.
As the classroom teacher, you will be part of the Management Team. You’ll also want to make sure the students chosen for this team have good leadership skills, good communications skills and can be trusted to perform in a responsible way at all times.
If services or supplies need to be obtained, how will our company pay for them?
The students of our class are filling the employee roles and instead of compensation, they are working for academic credit and internship credit. Our school district purchased the eCommSports Kit curriculum package which provides the support and services we will need to build and maintain the Web site we will use for this project.
If we do need to obtain products or services to achieve the goals set forth in this plan, we will use the following approaches:
How will your company pay for the required effort and resources?
We will consider selling advertising space at the site to local businesses. We can barter advertising space at the site for needed services and supplies. We can work with another school group or the team itself as partners in a fundraiser. We can charge a fee to have fans and patrons of the team place messages of support at the site. We can charge a fee to join the team’s official fan club.
What are potential reasons why your company might fail to achieve the goals of this project? After each potential reason, describe what your company can do to avoid allowing the project to fail.
What if too few people are visiting the Web site you create for the team. What could the class do to get more site visitors?
How to avoid this situation:
The Web site Operations Team will monitor site traffic and report trends showing a decline in site visitation so that the problem can be immediately recognized. The Management Team will try to figure out what may be causing the decline. One possible solution is to do more posters, morning announcements, press releases, and fliers about the Web site to make sure everyone knows the site exists. It is important to keep site content maintained and up-to-date. We can ask friends and relatives to help us spread the word about the site and team by e-mailing other friends and relatives.
What if one of the work teams is not getting its work done on a timely basis?
How to avoid this situation:
Weekly Team meeting will be held to make sure work is getting done according to plan. The Management Team will attempt to figure out what is causing a team to fall behind and address those specific problems. If a team is falling behind with its work, the Management Team will respond by lightening the team’s workload or getting additional help for the team.
What if the newspaper is not printing the press releases we sent them?
How to avoid this situation:
Make sure you find out what the newspaper's press release publication policy and process are. You can usually find this information at the Newspaper’s Web site. If it is not available at the site, call the Newspaper and ask for this information. Make sure your news release follows some general rules (see How to Write a Press Release). Keep it short. Double-space. Write clearly, addressing who, what, where, when, and why in the very first couple of paragraphs. Identify exactly who is sending the release and include the name and daytime phone number (with area code) of the individual you want contacted if the newspaper has questions. This contact reference should be your instructor or the student selected as president of your company. Date the release and indicate that the material is for immediate use. Follow-up calls can be effective after submitting a press release. Call as early in the day as possible to avoid calling reporters or editors when they are on deadline. When you make a follow-up call, make sure the person doing the calling is prepared to effectively and accurately respond to additional questions about your project and requests for additional information.
What if we are getting a steadily increasing number of visits to the Web site, but the number of fans showing up at the team’s games is not increasing?
How to avoid this situation:
This indicates a need to add information and features to the Web site that will work harder getting the site’s visitors convinced to attend a future game. We will devote more visible space at the site to promote the fan activities we have planned at future games. We will feature interviews with fans who have attended the games explaining the fun they get doing so. We will send out an additional e-mail message to the site’s entire mailing list on the day before each scheduled game that highlights at least three good reasons why a fan should consider attending tomorrow’s game. We will also increase our offline marketing efforts as well. We will do more in-school and in-community promotions targeted at people who do not use the Internet.
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