Learn more about VNN’s partner BoxOut Sports and watch a live demo of their software that makes it easy for athletic directors and coaches to create professional-looking graphics with a few clicks.
Transcription from our webinar held April 1, 2020
Rick Ehrman: Thanks everyone for participating, this is Rick Ehrman. I was pleased yesterday it had 15,000 people they maxed it out, so as we’re all gauging how COVID-19 impacts different industries, it’s interesting to watch Netflix, Costco, Purell, Zoom, Webinar, how some of these businesses, and we’re actually taking the motor approach, we’re really doubling down in certain areas of the business so I met, I probably met a number of you by phone in previous webinars where we’ve announced either acquisitions, new partnerships, or evolving go to market strategies. If not, just a very quick reminder I’ve been with the company now for seven months. Came on in July as CEO, came from the youth sports market where we successfully built and grew a business called Sports Engine, which we sold to NBC Sports a couple years ago so. I have five young kids they’re all athletes, I’m a son of an athletic director, a brother of an athletic director, and I kind of grew up you know understanding, you know, the challenges and the opportunities that come with that, with the occupation that many of you have so the only thing I’m going to say before handing it off to Robbie to get into the details, this is it, we take very seriously and spend a lot of time evaluating and analyzing technologies that we believe are digital tools that make an AD, coach, parent, and athlete’s lives easier so everything that we do either build, buy, or partner, we look at the entire industry, we evaluate all the players and we can get in later hopefully in a Q&A sessions why we chose BoxOut as our partner in this particular segment of the industry but I think it will become obvious as Robbie talks through the demo and explains the value proposition, and we’ve been feeding a lot of information and data back to our partners at BoxOut. Lessons learned, testimonials, different things that can help us collectively kind of evolve the product and provide the different tools and content that all of you are asking for. So the most important part of these are usually the Q&A, so feel free to jot down your questions and load them up. At the end I’ll be happy to answer anything that related to VNN, but for now maybe I’ll hand off to Robbie to dive into the product.
Robbie Lightfoot: Yeah thanks so much Rick. And just to kind of give you guys a little bit about what we do at BoxOut, I mean for me I’m actually also the son of an athletic director for about 20 years. I’m also the son of a college men’s basketball coach for about 30 years and I was a sports information director at a college for almost ten years and so that, it’s kind of got me in the sports realm, it was just in my blood and with that I knew as a sports information director very similar to high school athletic directors is that your time is everything and you wear so many different hats and you have so many different responsibilities, and it just seems like within the last maybe ten years that these, you know, the graphics, has just been such a big part of athletics. And what we were trying to do, I actually and one of my college roommates, are trying to figure out what is a good way that we can actually take a graphic that was designed in Photoshop or something that you take you, you know, 30 plus minutes in Photoshop to have in the palm of your hand and give you the opportunity to create it in two minutes or less. And so that’s what kind of sparked BoxOut. So we actually got all the resources and personnel together in a room, figured out a way to do it, and that was kind of the birth of BoxOut. Which, which, pretty much started in about 2014, and since then it’s just kind of exploded in the college market and so when we were approached by VNN we thought what’s a great opportunity for us to reach out so you can kind of see a little bit of the backstory there of who we were. It was just me and a co-founder that started this whole deal and since then when we launched it from the, the sports market for colleges, you the likes of Michigan State, Notre Dame, Ohio State, some of the big power five schools that we’re gonna dive into, are using the exact same platform that you guys have the opportunity to use as well. So what you see during this demo is exactly how these big boys do it at the power five Division One level. So that gives you an idea little bit of where we’re at you know we partnered with 41 of the 50 states, even in Hawaii. Sometimes that gets a little crazy when we’re doing customer support they’re like six sometimes seven hours behind us. Well, we take good care of them out there so we’re big on parts of the glove we even have some smaller Soccer Premier League teams that you know are overseas so we’re all over the place. It’s really nice and it stretches from you know minor league baseball to even traveling teams so we have a wide range of individuals that are using our product and it just makes their life a lot easier because like I mentioned earlier, a lot of these people have so many different responsibilities that they just don’t have the time or resources or they don’t have a graphic designer that’s in their athletic program that can be able to create something that says captivating and engaging that they deserve. And it’s something that these student athletes and teams deserve and so we wanted to make sure that we created a platform that was one, user friendly, and also gave them the recognition that they deserve especially now with all this COVID-19 stuff that’s happening right now. A lot of people are trying to do their best to highlight seniors for these spring sports and their teams because they haven’t played yet, so what they do is they function with player spotlights and they take advantage of these within our platform that we have templates that can highlight these individuals and it kind of helps put them in the spotlight and gives them the recognition that they just unfortunately didn’t get this year. So that’s a little bit about what we do, we try to make your life just much much easier and honestly if you want Romy I can actually if you want to turn the keys over I can actually show you how these graphics are made first hand and that way we can even walk through a quick little demo of what we can do to help kind of make your graphics pop. So I can even show you firsthand how this, how this works here.
Romy Glazer: Perfect, give me one second I’ll turn over control to you right now.
RL: All right hang on one moment I’ll show the screen. So, this is pretty much it so, this is BoxOut. And we just have created a VNN Sports demo, I’m just, you can kind of see the really cool thing about BoxOut is that you can start out with templates. And in our templates area we have a wide variety of templates that are categorized in folders. So, for instance, there’s game day graphics and score updates. There’s the player spotlights that we had talked about but then you can even scroll down and you can see that there’s a lot of different ones from motion video options. We have events and schedules even from sports specific stuff for a quote. There’s a lot of different opportunities to get the word out about your team’s in sports. There’s also a lot of cool opportunities in our operations and administrative folder. And that has a lot of things outside of social media. So I’m just going to click this one to show you that these graphics can be used for much more than just social media, and also we are adapting and changing to the time soo you can even see the first three official statements or just three different sizes of graphics that a lot of people have already used as official statements regarding this pandemic that’s been happening.
So rather than having them just type, you know, something through a tweet or a Facebook post. They actually have an engaging graphic with a photo in the background that’s branded specifically to them. But then there’s also opportunities that you can use from specific Twitter accounts if you wanted to put down your guys’ social media accounts you can. There’s locker room reserved seating stuff, so a lot of people will either put this on their lockers for individual student athletes, or if they have a tournament rather than putting their name, they’ll just put the name of the school and have it taped onto the door for reserved for locker rooms. There’s even one for like, single game and season credentials, so that way if you wanted to you can put the game with you and your opponent’s logo on there and then put the individuals name. You can print them off and laminate them if you wanted to. There’s even press conference name tents for signing days, so if you have a coach that shows up to sign one of your student athletes and you want to have his name, maybe the parents name or the student athlete’s name, you can easily print those out and have that ready. And there was even award certificates if you wanted to print off the sign, and we even have like tickets that if you wanted to.
So we have things outside of social media that can be used to your advantage. So I’ll just click back out here and then you can continue to see all the lists of all the different opportunities we have. We try to have all of our bases covered but we’re also adaptable so if you guys even have ideas or things that you’ve seen that you like, that’s what we’re here for. You can easily send us an email and we can take a look at it and see how we can best put some stuff together and then add it to the template area because the best part is we’re always adding templates, but we’re not changing the price. So the value goes up, the price stays the same, and we’ll get over through that. And I’ll throw it back to Romy who can kind of show you a lot of the packages that we, that we have so when you like a template if you’re going through here and you’re looking at these game day templates and you’re looking through and saying, you know what I really like this one, I don’t like this one, you guys can go through and it’s almost like going shopping on Amazon and rather than saying Add to Cart, you can simply just say add the team and when you say add a team what it’s going to do is it’s going to throw it up in this top left corner in your graphics tab and then that one we just added, premium game day 7, is now there so we have some like, options already that we’ve already previously added that I can walk you through but I’ll draw your attention on the left hand side to get the content you want and the assets that you want to upload.
You can actually take these uploads, this uploads tab, and from here you can simply if you have photos on your desktop you could drag them in. They’ll automatically upload and the top right hand corner, there’s that button where you can click on that actually says select photos to upload then you can just take that wherever your destination is on your computer. You can upload those, you could even add folders soo you can categorize them. It stays organized as you want, but since this is just a demo account this just shows you you don’t actually have to separate them by teams, you can actually create your own team pages that, ones that look like this so rather than saying VNN Sports demo, it can say your team name. Boys basketball, your team name, girls basketball, and everything can have its own separate entity. Then you can have an own team and you can give access to your head coaches or assistant coaches or student workers. You can give them access to what we call delegate and conquer, so not only do you have to be responsible for this but you can actually since it’s so user friendly, that you can actually turn the keys over to your coaches and assistant coaches and other staff members, but they can do this as well. And they can each be working in their own individual team page so the football coach can’t get into the volleyball coach’s, the track coach can’t get his, softball coaches. You can keep everything separate so that’s the best part, and that’s why you guys can all create content at the exact same time within your own individual team pages. So you can just simply drag these in, we just created these different folders so you can just drag these in, but you can do the same thing with videos so you can upload videos if you wanted to. These could be either MOV files or mp4. MOV is normally the format that gets used a lot when you are filming from an iPhone, it converts it that way so when you’re doing these, since BoxOut is completely mobile-friendly you don’t have to be bogged down behind a laptop or a computer. You can do all these graphics I’m going to show you today straight from the sidelines of football games, you know soccer games, inside for basketball. You can even take photos and videos from your phone and directly upload them there so we want to make sure when it comes to BoxOut we focus on two things, branding and then the quickness of it.
So we want to be as efficient and effective to get that graphic posted as fast as possible, and for guys as athletic directors we want to get to the point where we want your fans and other athletic directors. We want to get to that point where we want your fans and other athletic directors to look and say how on earth did they post that so fast, like I’m sitting in the gym with this athletic director who is somehow posting a graphic from the game with a photo that is of our gym and they’re posting it to their social media account. How do they do that, because I want in because that’s the best way to promote your student-athletes and your team’s, so that’s really our goal. The same thing with graphics, you can also upload your logos or different versions of them. We just have one logo in here now, as an example, and that’s how you can do that.
There’s two different, there’s three different subscriptions they’re faced at. Plus and premium. And with plus and premium you actually have access to an opponent database and the really neat thing about the opponent database is you guys no longer have to keep track of your own individual logos for your own opponents. So I’m just going to type in the word central just to give you an idea how this works. You basically just have, when you type in central you have all these different teams to type in. Your, of course, when you guys search you’ll be looking for a, you know, specific team, they’ll pop-up, and all you have to do is, I’m just going to click on Adams Central, and by clicking on them it’s automatically added them to this list at the bottom here with all these other schools, and what it just did is it pulled their name, their logo, their primary and secondary school colors, their abbreviation, all that stuff is stored and automatically added so when you go to create your graphics all you have to do, choose Adams Central from a drop-down menu, and then from there it’ll just pull it and put it right where it needs to go and make sure that it pulls the high-res file for that specific logo. So that’s pretty much how that works, and we’re always constantly adding to our database so there’s a lot of neat things that you can choose from that has a lot of good value for you. And I’ll show you here in just a little bit of how there’s even more than just school logos in our database for you. We went over templates, so I’ll go down to settings and in settings you can actually link your Twitter and Facebook accounts directly from BoxOut, so once you link these you just click authorize Twitter, and if you have the password and the username of that Twitter account or if you’re an administrator for that Facebook page, you can actually go in and link these directly so once you’re ready to post you don’t have to download it and go to Facebook.com or go to Twitter.com. You can do everything straight from this platform. You can also go to the bottom here, I’ll show you how you can actually do your team colors. So you can actually just zero in and seeing that you can want all these different colors, you can personalize these and we help set this up for you so that way if your colors are red maybe, it’s just red and black, will actually make sure it’s the exact red. Or maybe your colors are blue and orange, will make sure it’s the exact blue and orange that’s in your logo. So that way it keeps your guys’ brand very very strong, and then make sure that it keeps everything consistent and cohesive for you. And by clicking limit every team, your coaches and everybody else, they can’t change the colors, they can only use what you give them access to. Now if you wanted to do a pink out game or you had some breast cancer awareness, you can actually come here and add pink and you can add that to the color if you want to change it up, and we can just hit remove so that way you guys can see how that works.
So that’s pretty much the back end of it, so that way you guys can actually see how that works. Also if you guys click on graphics, we’re going to show you exactly how these thing are operated. Here, first one we’ll go to, here is just this game day one, it’s very very simple so I’m going to click on this and what happens is you’ll see the graphic on the right-hand side and on the left-hand side it’s really, it’s even easier really than an Excel spreadsheet, I mean you guys can go right through this line and you can just see how we’ve added these things in to kind of make the graphic what it is, so I’ll just go in here I’m going to change the font and just change things up. I’m going to change the text to this, I’m going to add white and I’m going to make this still gold. So you guys can see it and then you can change the overlays so if you wanted to add some character to your graphic I’m just going to click the update preview button at the bottom and the center here and you can see here I’ll actually switch it up here so you guys can actually better see it. You’ll hit update preview, and here you can actually change the graphic up to make it look a hundred different ways, and basically all your dents made minor minor changes so you can choose your half-tones, you can choose you know, grain, you can come back here and change all these different settings to make this graphic what you want it to be. And you just click update preview and you can see the changes you’re making in real time so a graphic like this would make it a lot better so that way something that took you a long time in Photoshop took you just a couple clicks. You can also go down to headline and this doesn’t have to say game day, I mean if it’s wrestling it can say match day, I’ll hit update preview so you can see what this looks like. I mean you can go in here and you can also say you know, if it’s for swim matches if it’s you know, track, I mean you can put in whatever you want on here to make it exactly what you want. And then here vs. is just showing you the top text you can put whatever information you want here. And the bottom text will do this and it’ll just add those characters, the repeated fields, it’ll just kind of jazz it up and make it look nice for you and then you would just click share and when you click share, and when you click on share it’s going to give you a couple different options. It’s going to download it or a quick, it’s going to give you one last look at your graphic, and Alex from VNN was nice enough to log in their post to Twitter so once you link your Twitter account you can simply go in here and you can do, start typing this stuff in. And then you would click post a Twitter, it’ll give you your character limits if you post to Facebook this will also create another box like this for Facebook. You can email it, you could download it, so sometimes what they’ll do is they’ll have a student worker that’ll actually do this and they’ll email it to their AD and then they can get eyes on it before they post it. And then from there you would just simply click done and then it’ll just show up in the bottom area here and we’ll just kind of save it for you so that’s a quick one of that graphic, but we have so many different other templates that you can choose from.
So I’ll just show you quickly one, how it uses with a photo so you can actually use this by changing up the text you can do the exact same thing, and right now we have this girls soccer player, but if you wanted to switch it up you can easily come in here and let’s just say this is for baseball. We’re going to go into this area where you can click on the photos. We’ll grab a photo of baseball, and the beautiful thing is you can actually crop this photo within BoxOut so if you wanted to you can crop up and just get the guy that just hit a home run. You can grab this and then you would click confirm, you can add these photo overlays if you wanted to, game day. Oh, let’s just say rather than game day just to show you the flexibility of it you can actually go in here and you can say Lion’s baseball wins, and you can even put here you can just say 5 to 4 and then you, let’s just say was in 10 innings, and then let’s just say Steve Phillips with a walk-off home run. We’ll hit update preview, and then a game day graphic, can look like something more than just that. So you can actually create a lot of different content strictly by using one graphic that was used for a game day graphic. You can use this for whatever you want by simply taking an advantage of the text boxes it did. So this also is another opportunity to look at the graphics from much more than what they were designed for, and you can easily do that. So if you wanted to even come in here and make the text gold, you can also do that. So if you want to flip-flop this just to show you how that looks really quick then it’ll just change that that way, and you can come in here in the day before a game or the day of a game you can even come in here beforehand and them just click Save, make the changes you want, and then you can even tell your coaches or anybody else who may be helping to say “Hey I went and I created all the graphics ready for the football game”, all you have to do is login and update the score, so that’s an idea of how a graphic can be done that way.
I’ll come down here and also show you a graphic that can be used that pulls the opponent database so here’s another score, here’s a score update graphic that has us playing right now. This Clay High School out of Ohio, we’re going to come in here and we’re going to change the colors here. We’ll change the font, we’ll also change the photo so that way you guys can kind of see. We’ll make this a men’s basketball photo, we’ll crop it because we want to get some of the basketball in there, and just to show you the ideas of the flexibility of this right now, it’s showing these bars of the logos on the left-hand side. Depending upon your photo you may want to flip-flop this and show it on the right-hand side. So we can do that and you can see where it pulled Clay’s green color for them, but let’s just choose Harbor out of California. So what we can do here is rather than a halftime score for basketball being three to one, let’s just say it’s 36 to 32, and then we can hit up play preview, and it’ll flop the photo and it’ll actually flip-flop the logos of them and grabbed a similar color of green for Harbor. So let me actually go down to Leesburg and see if it actually pulls a different color so that way you guys can fully see, there you go. So it actually pulled like the orange so you’re seeing when it pulls that it’s actually doing all that stuff for you. It’s pulling the exact hex color value of their logo and their color so not only are you best represented, but also your opponent. And if you like you know, what I actually want to make sure that I zoom in, maybe on the student-athlete more with grabbing the basketball, so you can come in here and crop this hit up they preview and then it’ll kind of zoom in on that a little bit. So if you wanted to get a closer up image you can.
There’s also a really cool feature that we do where you can colorize the photo. So if you actually wanted to give it a color wash based on the accent color that you did, you can hit update preview and choose to colorize it so a lot of times people will want to make it like blue or black and white, so if you wanted to you can easily come in here and change the value of that. So if you wanted to just get a soft color overlay, you guys could. So you can actually kind of colorize the photos a little bit based on the color selector that you added, and even you can invert these colors too. If you wanted to make rather than a navy blue with gold outline, you can flip-flop it and do it that way to it to add that little gold tint to your photo and even for game information at halftime you know you can say in third quarter. So you can really do a lot of stuff then you can put a hashtag if you wanted to at the top corner so you have a lot of flexibility and that hashtag doesn’t have to stay a hashtag, you could put the players name and actually saying that he had maybe 11 points at halftime. So there’s options in there too, where you can actually get pretty creative.
We also have an example of a student-athlete if you wanted a spotlight. Some you can actually bring in that, that photo the exact same way. So we just brought in this volleyball photo, and then you can colorize it if you want to again like we did the last time and then like I said you can easily come in here and let’s just say it’s something different and if it’s play of the game, it may say player of the week, you can just say it’s feature student athlete. And then you get up to four key stats, so let’s just, even though we have a photo where you can see there’s 11 digs, seven blocks, and three aces let’s just say we want to switch it to, maybe another photo, maybe we’ll go back to the soccer one that we had and we can just say this individual for the week had six goals and two assists. Now we don’t have a third stat, you can simply click this X, we’ll hit update preview, and then what you’ll be able to see is you’ll see the photo swap out with the two so a lot an athlete center based on the information that you’ve added. So that way anything you do is pretty much foolproof, so that way you can change this up. You can see we changed it to Kelsey Harrison, and that way we can make that up and then you will just slick share, and you’ll be able to post your graphic.
So a lot of flexibility. We also have the ability to create motion graphics, where you can actually record video. So here’s an example of a school in Indiana, that they actually just filmed their student athlete just holding a basketball behind a black backdrop, and then they just uploaded that graphic there and put the word game day so you can do some things like this too. You can also do, we also have a couple graphics here so this is one that I’ll hit update preview here in a bit, but this is a graphic I’ll show you for football is actually one that an athletic director got from the sidelines of their game, and one of the things we can do is we can change this word from game day. And we’ll just say sack and then we want to say hey, you know, let’s just say maybe a 25 yard loss, and then we’ll hit update preview. But you can also see that there’s these different effects that you can add to the photo. So if you wanted to add smoke or sparks or film or fire, you can do that as well. So what I’ll do is I’ll choose fire and I’ll hit update preview. And the only real difference between this is that it actually has to render out the frame, so it take just a little bit longer, but then you’ll see how this works where this athletic director recorded a sack on the sidelines of his game, and then you can see we’ve added fire and flames and everything like that. And, you can do a lot of fun stuff like like that and then you can just send it to you know, Facebook and Twitter and then that way you have a graphic like this, and so a lot of people use this in many many ways because it’s so flexible. It doesn’t have to say sack, you can say game day. So you can easily come in here, I’m going to choose another one, we’ll say game day volleyball versus Central. And let’s just say it’s at 7 p.m., and we’d rather than fire, let’s do maybe smoke. So we’ll hit update preview. So this gives you guys a lot of flexibility and many people just say you know what, this is a really good graphic, I can maximize this, it can be used for happy birthdays for student-athletes, even though we have birthday specific content you guys can use a lot of this stuff.
So you can see that how it has game days, followed over to Central and that way you guys can, can use this to your advantage where we added the smoke overlay to this you can also position the logo from far left to right, and then you would just click Save, and have your graphic. So you know something like that would be, would take a long time in you know, Adobe After Effects or Adobe Photoshop, and in here you know it’s just a couple clicks. Like you can see, and from there you guys can easily post this and have you know, first-class content.
Like I said, from the likes of you know Notre Dame, Florida State, Ohio State, Georgia Tech, big schools, you’re using the same thing. And we have graphics for schedules, so that way if you wanted to have upcoming schedules, you guys can easily do this and what many schools do, what we’ve seen in the past, is they actually create these BoxOut graphics, they’ll save them, and they’ll put them, on you know, their TV screen throughout the halls, they’ll actually print them ooff and put them on their bulletin boards, they’ll put them around businesses just to let them know what’s happening for their students that are happening at school. So, like I said, you can print these off and use them for more than just posting on social media, and also to go one step further if you wanted to, you can post these graphics on your VNN website to really dress that up. So it has a lot of purposed outside of just social media.
One more thing that I’ll actually show you, actually go back here, is one of the things you can easily do is you can actually, let’s just say there’s a graphic that you guys have for Senior Day. This is just a text grab thing you can look on, but let’s just say it’s the championship game, and we’ll just say that this is us. Lions vs. Patriots, we have our date that will just keep the same. We’ll just say the tickets are still available at the gate. One of the things we can do, let’s just say that rather than this team logo at the top, let’s just say we are in Ohio and we want to use their Ohio High School athletic logo rather than our logo in team logos. The only thing we’ve done is we have our logo, but at the top there’s an opponent library, or if you click on it you can actually type in OHS AA, and here is the Ohio State Athletic Association logo, where we’re going to put that in place of the lion because this is a tournament game. We’re in the championship game for our football team, and we’re going to have something that represents Ohio now, the same thing. We have a lot of them in here, but like I said we can always add to our database to make it even easier for you guys, so if it’s the Florida or maybe it’s the HSA, a lot of teams they do it there. You can go, you can come in here and if you’re from Florida, you can easily grab this so that way you guys don’t have to keep a database on your own, you can easily grab these and use them to your advantage, where we have those kind of stored already, and that way you can kind of use a graphic that is more accustomed to you guys, a state championship game, or maybe it’s post season stuff, or maybe there is, a, you know, a state champion that was awarded through a state championship tournament and you guys want to use their logo, you easily can.
If you guys search something and it doesn’t show up, like I said, feel free to email us because we’re constantly creating a database for our clients to make it easier for them so that way you guys can use this and take advantage of the, that logo database too. So I’ll just hit cancel, same thing goes for if you guys wanted to highlight you know, a starting lineup or something like this, if you had a starting five for basketball you can simply choose you know, a background photo, have your poster style if you wanted to, if it wanted to be a green over this rather than it kind of looking like a wrinkled poster, which is kind of in right now. It’s, a lot of Division One schools are doing, you can hit grain and add some subtle, kind of a grunge look to it, and then from there it’s just a matter of typing in the player. You can just do this, and then typing in their first and last name, and their position, and then it’ll actually put that where it needs to go, and then you can post it. So starting line up on the left hand side, can do that, and then you’re good to go, so I’ll just hit cancel on that but really that’s a quick overview of what BoxOut can do and how it can help you.
So with all these different graphics that we have, like I said going back to templates, this was just a quick flyby. But one of the things we can do is we can really get creative. Especially with some of the graphics we have from motion video, we can have different photos of different individuals from teams running on the field to logo swiping in and flying in. I mean we can doo a lot of fun stuff to kind of make it giving you guys that, that touch that many, many, Division One schools are doing right now. From, you know, schedules that animate and have the logos fly-in, to starting lineups for the names compile, there’s just a lot of fun stuff that you guys can take advantage of. And we found out that so many people are getting creative with these graphics that our designer, who actually works part-time for Notre Dame, putting them together with their recruiting for their football program. So what we do is we’re constantly adding more and more templates, and what he’s doing is he’s actually taking those concepts that Notre Dame wants and likes and what their student-athletes are preferring, and we just apply them to BoxOut, and then we just apply that graphic here, coated in, and then it’s ready to go.
So there’s also this new templates tab that we also have available, and the nice this is, like I mentioned, we also have so many different templates that come in online, so what you see is not what you get. You’re going to get a lot more. So we constantly are adding more and more content to these graphics just to try to be proactive with the COVID, with the COVID-19 situation by adding more ticket promo graphics, and we’ve added I think almost 20, maybe even 30 graphics over, over the first couple of last months. So in short, that’s pretty much what BoxOut is. Romy, I can turn it back to you if you want, and then from there if there’s any questions afterwards we can even sum, sum all that up.
RG: Perfect, thanks Robbie. Yeah, so I’ll jump in next when you share it over and I can share a little bit of the pricing details and just kind of what you get for the cost. And then I’ve also been following along with the chat and we have a handful of questions, so we’ll jump there, give me one moment and, that’s me. This window. Perfect, so that’s why we were saying a little bit earlier. So we have a couple different packages you know, the main thing that we were trying to do with the BoxOut is take this, really great collegiate level product and make it accessible for people in the high school space. You know, we know, you know, in the high school space we don’t have the budget like colleges do, so we split it into three different packages.
It’s basically a basic, plus, and premium, and the way they’re split is kind of what you get. So this is a yearly cost and it comes with all the updates that Robbie was talking about that the team adds. But the basic version is a $395 a year, and that includes all the still graphics that you saw. So any of those, you know, end of the game sort of features or, you know COVID-19 updates, or whatever it is. Then package plus runs a $1,095 a year, and that includes still graphics, plus some motion graphics. So it doesn’t include everything, but it’s got a handful of videos that you could use anywhere you see fit. And then the premium package is $1,895 per year, and that’s everything. That’s the whole enchilada. Still graphics, and all the motion graphics, and this wouldn’t be a webinar if we didn’t have a deal on them. So, so one of the things that we’re going to be doing is a promotion that’s going to run for new customers. We’re, you know, within the week I think after this webinar where we’re going to slice the prices a little bit on each of them to see if you guys want to get in to a basic version will be $325 for the first year. Plus will be $750 for the first year, and premium will be $1,400 for the first year so depending on where you’re at it’s an approximate savings of about three to four hundred dollars on that for the first year.
If you’re interested in, in taking us up on it or you want to have a more private demo you want us to walk through and ask some questions that maybe didn’t feel comfortable doing on the webinar, you can email Alex Kooi from our team at VNN. His email is alex@vnnsports.net, and he’ll be able to take care of you from there. So then Robbie if I have you and Rick as well, we’ll hop into the questions, the QA. So let’s see one of the ones that I saw a few times come through had to do with Instagram and Facebook, so we saw the Twitter access, is there any plans to add an Instagram or how do we get these graphics on Facebook.
RL: Yeah so Facebook you can definitely link just like you did with Twitter, the only thing with Instagram is Instagram does not like to play nice with third parties, so for some reason they don’t like to share their API switch, that’s why it’s so easy to retweet someone else’s you know, post. You can also share someone else’s you know, thoughts from Facebook. But as we all know, it’s like almost impossible to retweet or reshare someone else’s Instagram and putting it on our timeline and that’s just the way that they like their platforms. You do like and provide, so that’s why we added that email where you can email it to yourself or what many ADs do since Instagram just wants to be stubborn, is they post it to their Twitter timelines, and then from their phones they’ll actually just save the photo and then post that directly to Instagram, so that’s just a quick bypass.
RG: Perfect. Another question, opponent logos, are they in the database just from other schools using BoxOut, or how do you get the opponent both..?
RL: Oh yeah, that’s a great question. So, one of the things that we try to do is especially with new people, that sign up through VNN is we’ll go back through their schedule and we’ll try to see if we’ll do a cross, you know, we’ll cross examine exactly what is. So if there’s a school that maybe has a couple opponents, or maybe all the opponent that we don’t have in our database, we’ll add them so they’re not just selected specific to VNN teams. There are also team and your opponents, so any athletic director who may be playing a team, we want to make sure that logo is in there. So what we do is we consistently and constantly add more and more opponent logos as the days and months you know, compile. And we just take those and make them so that way every athletic logo opponent is eventually in the system so we’re constantly expanding that. So if it’s not there, like I said, always let us know and we can add that for you. But we really never want to have our clients creating their own opponents in there because that just takes extra time and we’re here to save time.
RG: Okay, one more Robbie. This one’s coming from Margaret about different text fonts. So are you able to include different text fonts depending if you have something special for your school?
RL: Yes, I mean, there’s a lot of different things when it comes to fonts. Now if you actually have for, for a lot of these we didn’t go over, but for fonts did, let’s just say you guys actually have a like, a consistent font that you guys use or a, maybe a font that you guys actually have that maybe your custom athletic font you guys. All you would have to do is just email us the font file and we can apply that for you. And I know different fonts that we have right now would kind of just be displayed at different sizes, so that we you can see whatever you want it to be. We don’t want to actually give you guys the opportunity to expand and make the text larger or smaller, because if you guys get caught tweaking, saying oh this looks, I want to increase or decrease, or I want to have control of this, it just takes more and more time away. So we’ve actually tried our best to make sure all the text looks consistent when you’re typing in your graphic, but if you actually have a font file that you would rather have in place of the options that we have, all we need to do is send that and then that we just eliminate the font choices and it’ll just automatically default your guys’ custom athletic font. So hopefully that answers your question but if not, feel free to and you can even email me and reach out direct too.
RG: Okay let’s see. So a few more. This is run from now through the entire 2021 C’s or school year. Yes so a purchase would run a complete 365 days from the day you purchase, so you know if you were to buy now for the next week or so, it’ll run through all the way into your spring sports next year. So, let’s see. Can these graphics be transferred over to other platforms such as my scores table?
RL: Yes, so anywhere that you can run a visual package whether that JPEG or PNG or gif file or MOV movie file, those can go.
RG: Does the basic package include the schedules and press passes, yes it does. And then someone also asks if we could repeat Alex’s email address, so happy to do that. It’s alex@vnnsports.net. Robbie, question for you, so we have a few people that are asking if we do coaches training, after, after the fact. I believe that’s something we do on our VNN side, but I want to ask you know, have you ever run you know, sessions for coaches?
RL: Oh absolutely, like I said we, we always want to, you know, divide and conquer, so between VNN and anything we can do on our end, we’ll absolutely set that up so I mean, the biggest thing we want is that if you’re going to be using this graphics package, we want you to get the full, the full length of it, the full example. I mean everything that we have to offer. So if you guys are ever uncomfortable and you guys think you guys need, or your coaches need training, absolutely. If you let us know, we can set that up and do a screen sharing demo very similar to what we’re doing, you know what I just did. So that way we can get everybody comfortable with the platform so that they’re always using it and maximizing the amount of graphics that they can be put out there so we can absolutely help them in any way we can.
RG: Perfect. And then one more Robbie for you. On the use side, so we had a few people asking how many people can use it if they have, you know, 32 head coaches, 150 total coaches they want to delegate. You know is there a limit to the amount of users that can get on your account once you have it?
RL: Yeah no not at all. That’s a great question too so yeah you can create as many team pages as you want. So a lot of times but we didn’t even touch on, is the fact that these graphics can be used outside of sports. So what a lot of high school teams will even do is they’ll use you know, allocated resources from the athletic department from you know, Jazz Band, from your book to on the academic side of things, they’ll all take their resources together and they’ll purchase a subscription that helps embody the whole entire school district rather than just, you know, one for athletics. So it doesn’t have to be limited to athletics you can use it for a lot of different areas, and with that you can create all those different team pages. You can create, you know, and have as many administrators and then users. So, many times, a student will have user rights where they can only create the graphics that the administrator has given them. But yeah you can give each coach their own team page. You can give student managers or yearbook individuals or maybe you have a photographer of your school that wants to do this. You can go one step further and do that too. So yeah there’s no limit to the amount of users that you can have, and no limits the amount of teams that you can have.
RG: Perfect perfect. And one last question before, before we head out. Are we able to use this, like, for instance, if we’re going to help our school district with graphics and those sort of things. I’m just wondering if there’s a way that, you know, principals or districts could also help if we’re all using it together.
RL: Yeah for sure, you absolutely can. And one of the things that we’ve had some people even do, is they’ll use it for school delays. So if there’s a two-hour delay or a cancellation, they’ll actually use a BoxOut graphic to get that word out. But you know if there’s any type of ensembles, or you know school programs, they’ll do that. If there’s any type of thing outside of athletics, they make sure that they do that. So the, really the possibilities are endless. And like I said, you can take a BoxOut graphic and use it more than just athletics, you can use it to your advantage to just say these are the text boxes that are in place. I can simply go in there type in whatever I need to be able to just post it online as quickly as I can and get the word out fast, but not only does it just do it fast but it just keeps our brand consistent and cohesive, makes everybody look exactly the same and kind of just, really really strengthens that brand. From athletics to academics, and that kind of cohesive marriage makes, makes the school district much much better.
RG: Love it, that’s great, Robbie thanks so much, Rick thanks so much. One more thing to note, I saw a few questions, it said if it’s 365 days you know, would they be able to get through the next spring season being that we’re in the middle of it right now, and I, you know, I’ve told people we can work it out, so if you email Alex we’ll figure something. If you guys want to get on board and start using it while, while schools are out so that you have it for next school year. Let us know, I’m sure we can make something work but thank you everyone for attending, I think this was great. We’ll probably do a few more of these, we may do a recap, I know that we hit our max number of attendees, so a few people may have gotten booted. But anyway, thank you so much you guys, and I hope everyone has a great rest of your Wednesday.
RE: Thanks everyone, stay safe!
RL: Yep thank you.
