Little Rock Athletics Partners with FanWord for Innovative Student-Athlete Directory Boost

LINCOLN, Neb. – In an effort to help boost the visibility of Trojan student-athletes, Little Rock Athletics announced it has partnered with FanWord as part of a new, innovative student-athlete directory boost called FanWord Boost.
 
Little Rock is just one of seven organizations to join this inaugural launch, alongside Florida State, Boise State, Oakland, Portland State and others.
 
On FanWord Boost, a publicly accessible platform, each registered athletic organization has their own directory that simplifies how fans, businesses, donors, and other supporters can find and connect with student-athletes for NIL partnerships, professional opportunities, or simply to engage with them on social media.
 
"I am excited that we are able to partner with FanWord and be one of the first schools to join in this endeavor," Little Rock Director of Athletics George Lee said. "This will allow us to enhance our platform and supplement our partnership with NOCAP Sports, providing more opportunities for our student-athletes. We're ready to launch this enhancement with FanWord for all of our student-athletes."
 
More than 40 NCAA and professional sports organizations are now using at least one FanWord product — FanWord Stories (a unique storytelling platform and service), FanWord Coach (an NIL education and compliance solution), or FanWord Boost — to help their athletes build, protect, market, and monetize their personal brands.
 
"It's a very special day for us here at FanWord," says FanWord CEO, Christopher Aumueller. "FanWord Boost is a unique NIL and student-athlete empowerment platform that will make it a lot easier for student-athletes to grow their brands and get discovered. It's great to align with these innovative organizations that truly value their student-athletes regardless of the sport they play or how many social media followers they have. It's something that couldn't align more with our DNA, and we are so excited to march into this new era together."
 
Unlike marketplaces and similar NIL solutions, FanWord Boost does not target deal facilitation. Instead, the platform exclusively focuses on making athletes more visible, marketable, and accessible. Because of the way FanWord Boost is set up, the platform drives traffic to institutional NIL platforms such as a local marketplace, therefore complementing and supporting existing solutions.
 
"Athletes currently don't have a place where they can showcase their entire brand in one spot," says Aumueller. "Looking at NIL alone, athletes use dozens of platforms to partner with brands, sell content, offer coaching services, etc. Then, you have athletes pursuing entrepreneurial ventures, starting their own podcast or hosting camps and clinics. On top of that, you have institutions launching local marketplaces or building their own NFT collection. With FanWord Boost, we are centralizing and aggregating that information so we make it as seamless as possible for athletes, businesses, fans, and other interested parties to interact."
 
FanWord will assist athletes with their onboarding and profile setup process.
 
After profile completion, athletes can then simply add their FanWord Boost profile link to their social media bios and start driving traffic to their profile. Athletic organizations can add a 'Student-Athlete Directory' to their athletic website as well as the FanWord Boost profile links to the roster pages of their athletes.
 
Businesses, fans, donors, and other interested parties can conveniently browse through the public directory and either look up specific athletes or search for certain queries — for example, all women's basketball players that are on Opendorse, all athletes that are on LinkedIn, all football players that sell merchandise, all tennis players that offer private lessons, and much more.
 
This will help all athletes, regardless of sport, gender, passions, or social media audiences size get discovered.
 
Additionally, each athlete can opt-in to have a contact button on their profile that allows businesses and fans to contact the athlete directly. Each message is filtered by the FanWord system first to ensure athletes aren't exposed to spam or random messages. Everything that is considered a serious inquiry will get forwarded to an email address of the athlete's choice.
 
For the latest information on Little Rock Athletics, make sure to check out LRTrojans.com. You can also find the Trojans on social media at @LRTrojans on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
 
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