Loyalty to a university, and especially to college sports teams, is one of the highest ranking emotional connections that exist within institutions. In most cases, higher than professional sports, and even that of specific churches or denominations. (Which is why you can see such extreme cases of loyalty when two of those institutions combine together, as they do with Notre Dame and Touchdown Jesus.)
This extreme loyalty is why Waypoint was founded, and again why we formed the Loyalty Lab as part of it.
What is the Loyalty Lab?
The easiest way to think about the Loyalty Lab is a full-service marketing agency. We assist universities in executing marketing campaigns from start to finish and offer a variety of creative services including ideation, data/analytics, strategy, and production. But our expertise also goes beyond the execution of marketing campaigns. We also function as an innovation partner for athletic departments as they learn to turn this loyalty of their fanbase into monetizable assets.
Simply put—We are a centralized team dedicated to unlocking the loyalty of your fans.
A Network Effect in Loyalty Innovation
Waypoint’s university partners don’t just benefit from their own platform—they benefit from the larger network. Each campaign, message test, and audience persona contributes to a growing database of best practices. With university audiences, there is very little, if any, overlap from one fan base to the next. So an idea that’s generated from one school can benefit all the rest. And our Loyalty Lab sits at the center of it.
Why This Matters Now
As athletic departments face rising NIL and revenue-share costs, and as donor fatigue sets in, schools are under pressure to find sustainable funding sources that don't just ask for more—they create more. Our Crowd commerce system of white-labeled platforms is one of those sources. But it only works if loyalty is treated as a capital asset—and activated with the same rigor you’d apply to fundraising or ticket sales.
If this is something that you and your athletic department could benefit from, we’d love to have a discovery call and discuss the ways we’ve implemented it with other schools, and how it can work specifically within your organization.