It was November 2017. Hockey Hall of Fame induction weekend in Toronto. At a cocktail party, CWHL Commissioner Brenda Andress and Spotify global marketer Caiti Donovan started talking. Andress mentioned how she “needed to get more butts in the seats” at women’s pro hockey games. Then, the conversation turned to the rise of the #MeToo movement. Andress and Donovan saw an opportunity to create a “call to action” for women’s sports. And the idea for SheIS was born. It officially launched last spring.
What exactly is SheIS? It sees itself as a movement. Co-founder Donovan says SheIS wants to “use women’s sports to create a future by and for strong women.” To do that, SheIS focuses on ways to increase women’s sports attendance, viewership and participation. What distinguishes SheIS from other groups that have similar goals? According to Donovan, it’s that SheIS is “putting that call to action out to the fans.”
Citing a recent Nielsen report that revealed 84 percent of general sports fans are interested in women’s sports, Donovan says, “We want fans to do more than just say they support women’s sports. That’s great that they’re interested. We want you to actually go and put your butts in the seats and put your eyeballs on the screen.”
You’ve got to applaud anyone who wants to take on that challenge. But like any women’s sports advocacy group, SheIS faces a dilemma with how it campaigns for better attendance, more viewers and greater participation. Does it portray women’s sports as a cause or a purpose-driven business?
You’re probably familiar with the social cause narrative: Female pro athletes are inspirational and aspirational. Participating in sports helps build young girls’ self-confidence, makes them stronger in mind and body and sets them up for success. That’s what a two-minute video on the SheIS website tells you. There’s nothing wrong with investing in women’s sports because it changes lives. But when women’s sports market themselves as a cause, they run the risk of being seen as a charity.
When a women’s sports league or team or movement sells itself as a cause, it sells itself short.
There was a time when going the social cause route was the smart move, sometimes the only move. Now, nearly 47 years since the enactment of Title IX, when a women’s sports league or team or movement sells itself as a cause, it sells itself short. It also creates the perception that the quality of the product on the field or court or ice is somehow inferior or, at least, not good enough to promote on its own merit. That’s the perception whether you’re selling women’s sports to fans or to potential sponsors and advertisers. You want fans investing because they get to see great competition and top talent. You want sponsors and advertisers investing because it makes business sense, because they’re aligning with great athletes and enhancing each other’s brands.
As a professor of sports management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Janet Fink has studied the way women’s sports are promoted and noticed the prevalence of the social cause narrative. “All my data shows that the best way to market women’s sport is to show them as athletes and how incredible they are as athletes,” she says.
That brings us back to butts in the seats and SheIS.
Remember that two-minute video on the SheIS website? It’s part of the SheIS Challenge. To date, the challenge is the group’s most high-profile initiative. Two weeks after its launch, the challenge had reached 117 million people through social media, according to Donovan. That’s impressive.
The goal of the challenge is to “build a community of 1 million supporters,” fans who will pledge to go to women’s events or watch them on TV or stream them. For every person who takes the pledge before the Women’s World Cup final, SheIS promises to “give $1 to help keep young girls in sports.” In the process, the challenge creates a nice, foundational database for SheIS.
The challenge represents how SheIS wants to support women’s sports from the top down and bottom up. From the top down, there’s the drive for increased attendance and viewership. From the bottom up, there’s the financial support of youth participation. By proceeding in those two different directions, it seems like SheIS is trying to strike a balance between championing a cause and treating women’s sports as a purpose-driven business.
Is SheIS onto something? Will it be a movement that changes the way fans support and engage with women’s sports? It’s way too early to tell.
So far, SheIS has promoted women’s sports at events affiliated with the U.S. Open tennis tournament, the WWE and the CWHL All-Star Game. It’s also built an impressive and diverse “collective” that includes Adidas, the WNBA, the USTA, TSN, multiple women’s pro hockey leagues, the NWSL, Fast and Female, WWE, the Women’s Professional Lacrosse League and the World Surf League.
No doubt the collective has helped spread the word about the SheIS Challenge and other events. But the bigger idea behind the collective is that its members will share ideas and best practices. In an industry where leagues and teams often see themselves competing for fans’ disposable income, that sounds promising.
“The long term is us looking at how we can create more cross-pollination amongst all of our leagues,” Donovan says. “We’ve really looked at this as a collaborative effort and as everybody coming to the table together.”
When everybody gathers around that table, let’s hope they find inspiration in each other and strength in numbers, enough strength to push women’s sports past traditional narratives. Then, let’s hope they reach a point where it’s consistently about the product first, not the cause.
Shira Springer covers stories at the intersection of sports and society for programs on NPR and WBUR, writes a column on women’s sports for the Boston Globe and teaches journalism at Boston University. She can be reached at sbj.springer@gmail.com.
