De Soto High School
In many schools across the country, communication between students, teachers, parents, and staff often falls behind the modern standard. Announcements about school events do not always make it to the ears of parents, and students are sometimes ill-informed of participation opportunities. Before the SuperFan platform, there was not a simple solution for streamlining correspondence. De Soto High School in De Soto, Kansas took advantage of the SuperFan platform but took it one step further – they let their marketing class run the DHS Wildcat Nation program.
De Soto High School set out to accomplish ways to get their students, staff, and community more engaged in their events, and to have a communication tool that stakeholders could use to stay up to date on all things DHS. By pursuing these objectives, DHS stumbled upon some secondary results. Not only did they see increased attendance at activities and sporting events across the board, but they were able to provide their upper-level marketing students with a real-world opportunity to work with a state-of-the-art application technology.
The fact that we have the SuperFan platform has been huge
A group of about 5 students in De Soto High School’s upper-level marketing class have a high level of responsibility when it comes to executing the daily and long term tasks of managing the SuperFan platform. From managing events data to finding and distributing the prizes and rewards, these students are gaining real-world experience by having the opportunity to apply marketing concepts learned in class to a cutting- edge digital platform.
The students are also able to work with local sponsors, and present to different businesses about becoming involved. The Activities Director at DHS, Ryan Johnson, allowed what would normally be a staff or faculty responsibility to become an opportunity for his students to learn.
The backend of the SuperFan platform is very easy to learn, according to Johnson, and the students were excited to have an outlet to express the concepts taught in their marketing class. Not only is this a real-world experience, but it allows the students to be one step ahead going in to college, where they’ll have an early opportunity to learn if something in this industry is a path they would like to pursue. The SuperFan platform easily serves as an educational tool as much as it does an engagement platform.
Because this is a student-run program for DHS, there is intrinsic motivation for the students to attend the new events and engage in the class competitions. DHS has seen better than usual attendance with regards to the students, their student sections have been larger than previous years, and in the majority of sports as well – not just the traditionally popular ones. But according to Ryan Johnson, the biggest payoff from the SuperFan platform is the one-stop-shop for communication. Students, staff, parents, and community members know that the DHS app has all the information they need.
