Lehigh Athletics has a new addition to the team and it’s not an athlete. It’s the Mountain Hawks Rewards App, introduced to Lehigh in August.
The app incentivizes students to attend Lehigh athletic events by offering points for going to games and prizes for obtaining points.
“The whole goal of the app is to bring more student involvement in athletics,” said Matt Lippinscott, graduate assistant in sales and marketing for Lehigh Athletics. “Everybody’s so tech savvy, everybody has a smartphone, so we figured the best way was to use an app.”
Once users download the app, they have the ability to create a profile and then check in at Lehigh sporting events. By checking in, they earn points that are redeemable for prizes. Checking in at a sporting event gives users 10 points and additional points can be earned by tweeting through the app at the event.
Rich Haas, the assistant director of marketing for Lehigh Athletics, said the app’s ease of use has a lot of students excited about it.
The app also features a list of all upcoming Lehigh sports home games. Users can view the list and subsequently decide which sporting events they want to attend.
“All home events are there, so it’s really easy to keep track of which events you want to attend,” said Brooke Astor, the assistant coach of Lehigh’s track and field team.
Once the users start to accumulate points, they win prizes such as mini megaphones, free Pepsi products and even a chance to win a Domino’s pizza party.
“It’s simple,” Haas said. “The days of fliers on bulletin boards are a thing of the past. Now, everyone’s walking around on their phones so we delivered both the promotion of the event and the prize right to the phone.”
One of the most challenging aspects of creating the app has been publicizing it so that it becomes fully integrated into the lives of Lehigh students.
Lippinscott said the goal is to have 1000 downloads by the end of the first semester.
Haas said the marketing team’s strategies have included posting about the app on the Lehigh Athletics Facebook and Twitter profiles, hanging up restroom signs at sporting events, creating ads for the Lehigh Sports website and getting the word out at the fan services table at football games.
“It’s kind of hard to promote something that you’ve never had before,” Lippinscott said. “People have a gray area of uncertainty about it, but once the ball starts rolling and everyone is on board, it will get a lot better.”
The first women’s soccer game was during orientation, so the app’s marketing team started publicizing it there to the first-year students who attended. Astor said this was a good way to get students in the habit of attending events from the beginning of each season, while seeing that this app is both exciting and easy to use.
The app also has a competitive element, which features a leaderboard where the top 10 users have upwards of 100 points.
“We just hope it’s something that people have fun and it enhances the experience,” Lippinscott said.
If the app proves to be successful, the marketing team said it has some exciting plans for the future as well.
Both Lippinscott and Haas hope to expand the app so that it can include events other than sports games, such as concerts and shows. Ideally, they want this app to be a centralized event system for Lehigh, where different organizations can upload their events on the app to promote it and use the prize system as an incentive for students to attend.
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