Innovation can change everything. More than a decade ago, entrepreneur Jamie Pardi was inspired by a passion for sports and an interest in technology to found FanCompass. Today, the company continues to ensure a thriving business of sport by innovating new digital products and services at the intersection of sports, technology and fan data.
FanCompass has offered experiential learning opportunities to students in the David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, thanks to Pardi working closely with Internship Director Steve Taylor.
Pardi and his team have had good interns in the past, but this semester’s group was particularly outstanding. Jenna Callan, Tim Thomas and Maggie Thrasher separated themselves from the crowd from the beginning of the hiring process, putting into practice lessons learned in the College of HRSM.
They were ready on time and professionally dressed for video interviews, and it was immediately clear to Pardi and his team that all three had done research about the company.
“They prepared answers for typical generic interview questions while also not being stiff, but rather genuine and conversational, and even prepared questions for us. It was clear they had at least combed through our website to get an idea of who we are. It’s always obvious when someone has applied with no idea of who FanCompass is or what we do,” Pardi says. “One of the bigger things was post-interview follow up. Thoughtful thank you notes, mentioning something further about how they fit the role, and showing continued interest go a LONG way in keeping the candidate at the top of mind.”
Thrasher had previously worked for an MiLB team, and that team reached out to Pardi when they heard that Maggie had applied at FanCompass and urged him to bring her on. It was something that had never happened before in Pardi’s career.
“So always be sure to keep those connections strong and remember the sports industry can be a small world,” he advises.
The three interns worked together, but each had specialized roles.
Thomas, as FanCompass sales intern, helped with bringing in new teams as clients, and helped with sponsorship as well. He assisted the sales team to prospect new leads and assists with outreach to schedule demos. He was able to join demo calls as well to watch firsthand how FanCompass tries to add new teams to its client roster.
Thomas also assisted sponsorship intern Jenna in the weekly sponsorship presentation, giving internal and external industry sponsorship updates. Jenna also joined external sponsorship sales calls and helped our team gather materials to build sponsorship proposals. She also joined brainstorming calls where she contributed to developing creative campaign concepts we could pitch to various sponsors, helped select the appropriate teams in those proposals and supported anything else the FanCompass sponsorship salespeople needed. During the weekly sponsorship update call, she finished each call with a short presentation highlighting current successful sponsored campaigns, recent industry sponsorship deals to be aware of, and insights into opportunities to activate based on upcoming seasons, holidays, or relevant industry news. Jenna was also the lead intern in building sponsorship summary reports — these reports helped FanCompass teams see their sponsored campaign results at a glance for internal use or to share with partners. Lastly, Callan joined external calls with sponsorship departments of various teams to help teach them how to sell campaigns to their brand partners.
Thrasher, the marketing intern, helped the company's head of marketing come up with content, write copy and edit for the company's two monthly newsletters that went out to hundreds of contacts within the sports industry. She also helped develop content for multiple weekly social media posts published through the FanCompass social media channels. She tracked the metrics of these posts and newsletters and reported on them in a monthly marketing meeting. In addition, she helped with the company's recent update to the company website and with creating content for various webpages.
Thrasher, Callan and Thomas worked together on a large project of gathering FanCompass data from the last calendar year and presenting on the top team and campaign performances across multiple categories.
“This group has done very well in bringing their best to every task. We don’t expect perfection, but rather a dedication to listening, learning and improving, and this group has shown time and time again that they can take feedback and implement it to improve their work. As a result, we have been able to trust their work without needing to painstakingly review it for errors. Further, we’ve been able to hand them advanced tasks that previous intern classes haven’t always had access to. For example, interns aren’t usually on external sales demo calls, and they don’t usually get to work on content directly in our CMS (Squarespace),” Pardi says. “When given opportunities to present their work on company-wide calls, they have been confident and proficient in their abilities to speak in front of others. They have been able to ask about further job opportunities and get connections, as best as we can help them, for their next steps.”
All three FanCompass interns will graduate this May, and all have a bright future thanks to their exceptional performance when presented with opportunities like this one.