How Berean Christian School's athletic department got its whole community behind its teams - with less than an hour of work each week

Berean Christian School is a Pre K-12 Christian school in West Palm Beach, FL with about 800 students. Doug Walters is the Athletic Director, but also coaches varsity volleyball and runs transportation (which means he doesn't have much free time).

Before Berean, he spent 16 years as a college volleyball coach - where he was in charge of his program's social media accounts and gained an appreciation for the value of great communication and marketing.

"I'm used to working with sports information departments, putting out information," Doug says. "I understand the value of getting information out there as much as you possibly can."

With Gipper, Doug can create graphics, publish to social media, and update campus TVs from one platform — making it quick and easy to get the word out.

Gipper products now used: Engage & Display

"A couple of years ago, we would have a game and nobody would know about it," Doug says. "There would be a game that night, and the next day at school, nobody knew who won, what the score was, anything like that." 

Here's what they had in place:

An expensive, outsourced social media contractor. Berean was paying an outside contractor to create graphics and produce their social media content. 

A TV that sat blank for a year in their gym lobby.  The school installed a TV screen in the gym building lobby before the prior school year, but it never got used.

No screens in the cafeteria. Every single student, preschool through 12th grade, passes through Berean's cafeteria. Despite the heavy foot-traffic, no screens were set up to improve on-communication communication.

Morning announcements nobody listened to. Information went out over the PA, but was often ignored.

Doug ended the relationship with the social media contractor and signed up for Gipper Engage at the start of the summer. Six weeks later, he added Gipper Display to manage two campus TVs.

Here's what changed:

Gipper replaced their social media contractor. "We were paying a lot more than we were paying for Gipper, and the content just wasn't that good," Doug says. "So we said, why don't we take that money and put it in this and do what we are very good at." Everything now gets created in Gipper.

"I'm doing less work putting together social media stuff than I ever did when I was contracting it out."

They use two TVs to improve on-campus communication. Doug plugged a Gipper media player into the gym lobby TV and put the second screen on a rolling cart in the cafeteria, until they mount one permanently. Setup for Gipper Dispay was plugging in the media players and entering the Wi-Fi password. He pulled in his IT guy once for the network login. "Other than that, that was it."

One platform that can share content to five places. Doug creates a graphic in Gipper and can share or schedule it to X, Instagram, Facebook, and directly into slideshows playing on his two TVs.

All of it takes under an hour a week. Scores, schedules, and game day graphics go out daily. Student-athlete recognition, senior nights, and school announcements get shared on the screens too.

The impact:

The Berean community can't miss what's happening in athletics. Doug creates graphics and schedules them to post to all of his athletic department social media accounts and campus TVs. Because content gets shared both online on social media and in-person across his two TVs, his community is up-to-date with athletic department news. 

All of their content stays on-brand, effortlessly. Berean's colors and fonts are loaded into Gipper once. Then, thanks to AutoBrand, every graphic matches automatically. 

Changing what's on a screen for special ocassions is effortless. For Berean's first home volleyball match, Doug switched the gym lobby screen's content from a standard slideshow of announcements to volleyball-specific graphics and concession stand prices for the night. In Gipper Display, swapping the content on a screen is just a click of a button.

Berean is creating positive first impressions both on social media and on-campus. "We're in the private school space, and the private school space is a competitive industry. Everything that we can do to increase that look when people are on our campus helps us out in the long run. First impressions are important."

Would Doug recommend Gipper to another AD? "Yes. I would highly recommend."