How Fowler Ave Collective Helps Student Athletes Monetize Their Name, Image, and Likeness with Squarespace Enterprise
After choosing Squarespace Enterprise:
+50 student athlete websites
+2 professional service offerings (website creation and branding)
Fowler Ave Collective supports student athletes at the University of South Florida in marketing their name, image, and likeness (NIL) and opening doors to professional talent opportunities. When the NIL collective needed a partner to improve the athletes’ online presence and expand their digital footprint, Squarespace Enterprise was the top choice.
“Students came to us asking how to brand themselves, start a website, or sell merchandise, and Squarespace Enterprise is the perfect solution,” says co-founder and chairman Corey Staniscia. “We needed a way to help a host of athletes accomplish these things as a group.”
Staniscia was already familiar with Squarespace’s strong, no-code website building and ecommerce capabilities from personal experience, but he found the enterprise platform particularly valuable as a project management tool. His goal was to equip 50 athletes with a website, a domain, and website-creation training, and he needed a solution that could help him manage the entire initiative.
Managing an all-star sports marketing portfolio with Squarespace Enterprise
Through the Enterprise dashboard, Staniscia can view all athlete websites from a single place and manage their development progress along with any related contributor permissions. He also plans to closely track site traffic analytics and discuss them with students to identify sources of their visibility gains and maximize exposure.
“Analytics are a great tool to show students what’s working for them,” Staniscia says. “They might see a traffic boost after they play a big game or upload a new video, and now we can track that progress.”
Working in concert with Fowler Ave’s dedicated Squarespace account manager and an internal branding coach at the NIL collective, he plans to provide students the assistance they need to smoothly launch and maintain their sites. He says website creation and branding are two important components of the organization’s multi-pronged approach to offering athletes professional services.
“Our athletes are very excited about this project—they know they need to have their own websites, but they don’t always know how to get started,” he says. “Squarespace [Enterprise] helps them jumpstart the process.”
Scoring more with self-sufficiency for student athletes and their websites
Giving students control over their personal branding and merchandising was non-negotiable for Staniscia, so he sought a solution to democratize the process. Squarespace’s hassle-free Fluid Engine website editor and robust ecommerce features and integrations assured him that students could manage their sites independently with minimal guidance.
“We want students to have their sites forever, and adapt them as they grow and mature,” Staniscia says. “Probably the most attractive thing about Squarespace Enterprise is that it lets us provide everything on their behalf for twelve months, and then they can take over and continue from there on their own.”
Staniscia says launching and maintaining a personal website is essential for all student athletes who want to monetize their talent, no matter what their career goals may be.
“Whether they’re looking to play major league baseball, get a job, or go to law school after college, they need to present the best version of themselves online,” he says. “And now, we’re able to provide the tools they need to make it happen.”