Spring Conference Season Recap

Watch our Vice President of Sales, Shannon Blackwell, or scroll below to read more.

After many weeks and back to back conferences, we wanted to share the top six topics we heard quite a bit about during this Spring Conference season. 

Licensing. With college athletes now able to capitalize off their collegiate athletic experience, it is important to understand the rules and regulations and to explore how this can impact your campus retail. Think about how to engage athletics, build relationships with athletes and develop general merchandise that helps further connect your athletes, students and community. 

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Ask yourself what you and your team are doing to continue the DE&I conversations on campus, especially how it relates to your departments, housing, dining, retail, etc. 

Labor Shortages & Budget Reductions. Many of your colleagues are dealing with reduced budgets and continued labor shortages. While filling those positions is imperative, it is important not to lose sight of those employees who you do have today.  Do you know what drives them? Are you empowering them in their position and giving a trajectory to grow? It costs us all more to find a new employee than to keep an existing one, so be sure you are not losing focus on those that know your business and can make the greatest impact today. 

Student Success. With so many different audiences requiring auxiliary focus, it can be easy to think financial return, department leadership and streamlined processes are top of mind. Auxiliary leaders reminded us not to forget student success! Many of your colleagues emphasized their desire to ensure students are successful at their institution and to find ways to track and measure the impact auxiliary services has on that student success. 

Disruptive Innovation. According to Harvard Review at the broadest sense, “disruptive innovation” is any situation in which an industry is shaken up and previously successful incumbents stumble.” Higher education is the definition of disruptive innovation, whether that is how we do things, the rules we must follow or the students we serve, it is constantly changing requiring us to innovate quickly. 

Equitable Access. While Slingshot has been providing auto fulfillment models for more than 15 years and true Equitable Access for 11, it has been amazing to see the market catching up. Equitable Access was a topic at nearly every single conference. And when you think of how it helps mitigate many of the challenges discussed above, it makes sense.: Leveling the course material playing field, stabilizing financial performance while reducing student expense, improving student success and continually being innovative. Even if you do not think EA is for you today, be sure to understand the term and how the program works – it is the next innovation in course material delivery.