UCF Athletics will offer LAUNCH, its department-wide plan for when NIL (name, image, and likeness) legislation soon goes into effect—featuring partnerships with Opendorse and COMPASS.
The LAUNCH program is designed to assist UCF student-athletes build their brands and take advantage of marketing and other opportunities made available by the NIL legislation expected to go into effect in the State of Florida on July 1, 2021.
"Our LAUNCH program incorporates multiple new elements to assist our student-athletes with navigation of these opportunities—and we are excited to add the Opendorse and COMPASS platforms to what we already were offering to them," says UCF vice president and director of athletics Terry Mohajir.
"We know this can be a turnkey operation for all our student-athletes that best enables them to take advantage of both marketplace and campus resources.
"We also know our location represents one of the most attractive to build a personal brand—based in part on our 72,000 students, 322,000 alumni and 2.5 million Orlando residents. All that, combined with the fact UCF football has ranked number one nationally since 2017 in social media engagement, provides a multitude of opportunities."
UCF already has been working with Opendorse since 2016, primarily to make images, graphics and video available to student-athletes for use in student-driven social media postings. The expanded relationship provides additional technology platforms that enable Knight athletes to navigate their NIL opportunities and maximize their personal brands via content distribution through use of a mobile app for saving and publishing content.
UCF in 2017 was the first institution to deliver video content through a student-athlete's social channels. Then, in a pilot program that began in the summer of 2020, more than 64,000 pieces of content were shared with UCF student-athletes.
The COMPASS NIL platform—developed by CLC, the nation's largest trademark licensing company--offers education, proven systems and monitoring to enable UCF student-athletes to maximize their marketing opportunities while remaining compliant with NCAA guardrails and federal and state legislation. The COMPASS platform assists in the education of student-athletes and monitors all NIL-related activities in conjunction with the UCF Athletics compliance department, offering a mobile app to accomplish those tasks.
COMPASS will offer guidance and education in the areas of personal and business branding, social media awareness, securing endorsements and sponsors, the science of negotiating a deal, licensing and endorsements, running a business, protecting intellectual property and the politics of personal brands. There will be a separate plan for educating UCF coaches and staff on allowable student-athlete services related to NIL, staff do's and don'ts, as well as how the NIL impacts recruiting.
With the announcement of NIL, companies are bursting onto the scene, offering an array of NIL-centric products and services to athletes. UCF will provide guidance for choosing the right marketplaces for student-athletes to maximize their NIL goals while staying within NCAA guidelines. On campus UCF student-athletes also will have access to free student legal services as well as resources of the UCF Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
"We are here to serve our student-athletes in every area--academics, athletics, success after graduation, nutrition, mental health--and building their personal brands is definitely one of them," says Mohajir. "We are invested in helping them become outstanding alumni by developing their brands. As a result, we are guaranteeing 100% job or graduate school placement."
For the 2021 UCF spring football game, the Knights put Twitter handles on the backs of jerseys as a one-time strategy to help promote the personal brands of student-athletes. During the game, those same student-athlete Twitter handles were also used on graphics on the video board to promote them during the game.
UCF's existing social media team has been creating player-driven content for student-athletes to use on their personal social media channels as part of UCF Athletics' social strategy. The UCF Athletics web site (ucfknights.com) includes a student-athlete blog that allows their voices to be amplified—and student-athlete personal brand logos in the form of personal shields on UCF football graphics also have been made available.