Bumped. This is good stuff. Keep the ideas coming. GO BRUINS. - N

One way of thinking about raising attendance is binary - find some people who don't attend and find ways of inducing them to attend. 'People don't go to games because tickets can't be transferred - tickets need to be transferable, and then problems will be solved'. In basketball, where the stadium is easily accessible and capacity is small, this may make sense.

Another way is to think about fan commitment on a sliding scale, and imagine there is a distribution with some number of hardcore fans, some number of somewhat committed fans, some number of fairweather fans, and some number of people with no interest (this isn't meant as a definitive schema, just for illustration). If you can shift some people from being 'somewhat committed' to being 'hardcore' you raise attendance, but shifting people from the large group of fairweather fans into being 'somewhat committed' raises average attendance as well. So, a relatively small change in support across the whole distribution could increase average student attendance significantly. I think this especially applies to football.

With that in mind, I have one small and easy area in which the school administration could make a contribution.

Continue reading this post »