Tagged

TigerBlog does not consider himself to be a fashion expert.

He's pretty lucky he works where he does, since he can rely heavily on wearing Princeton Athletics gear pretty much every day. Before Princeton's current arrangement with Nike, TigerBlog relied on two words to guide his wardrobe: solid colors.

TB biggest fashion struggle, he supposes, is whether or not to tuck a particular shirt in or not. For instance, right now he's wearing a long-sleeve black Nike Princeton Athletics shirt and khaki pants.

Should the shirt be tucked in? Let the record reflect that it is.

In general, TigerBlog is not a fan of ever tucking a shirt in when he's wearing shorts. Maybe he's missing the boat on that one.

And he never likes to tuck t-shirts in, unless he's wearing other layers on top of the t-shirt.

Yesterday, though, was a tough one.

It was Tiger Athletics Give Day, and the email went out Monday night encouraging everyone here to wear the Princeton Athletics 150th t-shirts. The Give Day was an off-shoot of the 150th anniversary, which was Nov. 22.

TigerBlog had on khaki pants and a long-sleeve orange t-shirt with the gray 150th t-shirt over it. Should he have tucked it in?

He didn't. Again, he went with the "no tucking in t-shirt" philosophy. As he looked around Jadwin Gym yesterday, he noticed some tucked in and some not. He'd guess the no-tucks won, but not by a lot.

As for the other winners yesterday, well, there were a ton of them, and not just the teams who eventually will be named the winners once all of the donations that came in are tabulated.

In some ways, it was like Election Day, with early returns, projections and all of the returns not counted long after the polling place closed.

In this case, the returns were donations, and the competition was among Princeton's Athletic Friends' Groups, who were seeing who could have the highest levels of participation.

TigerBlog wasn't sure what to expect from the first Give Day. As it turns out, it appears to have exceeded all expectations.

For starters, the winners still aren't known, because there are so many gifts still being counted. The original goal was to reach 1,150 gifts; that number was obliterated early on, probably on the order of seven times as many or more.

The totals will be released as they're available.

TigerBlog is interested in the lessons learned here.

There's no bigger takeaway than that fact that it was a huge victory for social media efforts.

The Give Day was advertised on goprincetontigers.com, but it was really pushed hard on Twitter at @putigers.

For about two weeks, the OAC tweeted pictures - old ones, recent ones, color ones, black and white ones, funny ones, championship ones, celebrations, individuals. TB wasn't sure at first what to expect from these pictures, but they were greeted with retweets and favorites and comments.

All of these pictures had the hashtag #TAGD, which was the Tiger Athletics Give Day hashtag - as in "You've Been Tagged." Most had links to the TAGD website.

TigerBlog was concerned that the volume of these pictures might cause people to stop following @putigers, but the opposite happened - numbers went up during the last two weeks.

There were also trivia questions with t-shirt giveaways (don't tuck them in) and tickets to be won, and they were way more popular than TB would have guessed as well. 

The other takeaway is that when the teams mobilize, the word really gets out.

Each team wanted to win, because 1) there were prizes for the Friends' groups that did the best and 2) because these people are competitive. The result was an additional effort from the teams, through  emails and phone-a-thons and notes and everything else.

And especially social media.

TigerBlog saw some incredibly creative stuff across the board from the individual teams on their own Twitter accounts. And he saw a real commitment to making each team's Friends understand how serious the whole Give Day was.

It's a whole new world, one that is constantly evolving. The ones who understand that and stay current and committed have a huge advantage over those that don't, whether it's an athletic communications office or a team itself - or a business or civic organization or school or anything.

Meanwhile, the 24-hours of Give Day have come and gone.

When TigerBlog got to Jadwin yesterday morning, there were people who had been manning the phones since midnight. When he left, the night shift was getting here.

Plus there were all of the online gifts as well, which far exceeded those who called.

Regardless, it's clear just how engaged each team and Friends' group was.

The individual winners will be announced once it's all counted up.

The real winner? Princeton Athletics - courtesy of all those who were tagged.