Football and WiFi: How One Utility Connects with Fans (and Subscribers) on Friday Nights

What You’ll Learn

Every Friday night, stadium lights flash on and fans in purple or red file in. Before the crowd roars for touchdowns, they pull out their phones to connect to free Wi-Fi from the co-op. Pea River Co-op’s Brenda Overton shares how this tradition kicked off and why it might score for you, too.

Guest Speaker

Brenda Overton

Show Notes

Transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Intro: A production of Pioneer Utility Resources. StoryConnect, helping communicators discover ideas to shape their stories and connect with their customers.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Football and Wi-Fi. How one utility connects fans on Friday nights. That’s what we’ll be talking about on this episode of The StoryConnect Podcast. Hi, I’m your host, Megan McKoy-Noe, one of the storytellers at Pioneer Utility Resources. And I am joined by Brenda Overton.

Brenda Overton: Hi. It’s nice to be here.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s so nice to have you. Now, Brenda, you are the vice president of broadband at Pea River Cooperative in Alabama.

Brenda Overton: That’s correct.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And we are not in Alabama right now.

Brenda Overton: No, ma’am. We’re halfway across the world. It feels like.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s a stretch from there. We are podcasting from the Calix ConneXions Conference. So we like to say that any background noise that you might notice, it’s ambiance. We’re setting the mood for inspiration today.

Brenda Overton: Sounds great.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah. So, Brenda, thank you so much for joining us. We’ve got lots of football fans across the nation. Right. Lots of football fans across rural America. So I’ve got a feeling folks are going to love hearing about a high scoring program at Pea River. Every Friday night, the local stadium lights flash on, fans in purple or red file in, and before the crowd roars for touchdowns, they pull out their phones to connect to their free Wi-Fi from the co-op. Where did the idea for Friday Night Wi-Fi come from, and how long have you been doing this?

Brenda Overton: So honestly, it came from here last year from the general session. Calix has a great product that they do with outdoor Wi-Fi and another utility, Tombigbee Fiber in Mississippi, they launched it across their entire territory. They have a lot more schools in their territory than I do. But, I love to learn what other utilities are doing. And I’m like, oh man, this is so cool. And it’s so easy to do, and it’s great advertising. You know, very inexpensive advertising too.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And you’re providing a service.

Brenda Overton: And I am providing a service. People who don’t have our services yet have the ability  to jump on and see what it’s like. And, and hopefully it helps us get them onboarded to Pea River Broadband.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, I was excited because you’ve got some great graphics that you put out for Friday Night Wi-Fi. I’m curious, how do you monitor the use of your network during the games?

Brenda Overton: So we use the app. Right now, we’re offering – what we have set up is kind of like a residential service. We haven’t done the full business side of it at this point, because we were in such a hurry to get it up. So I have two schools in my system that I can serve, and those schools are rival schools. And my CEO’s son goes to one of the schools. So I could not do anything at one school that I didn’t do at the other. So we didn’t get the, we didn’t get fiber to the second school until the week before school started. So then it was like a mad rush for us to just try to get it up and get it operational. Because again, we felt, we saw the need. We saw we were opening in a new area. We were looking for ways to let people know that we were there and that it was available, and we wanted to just give back, you know. We wanted to show that we really are part of the community, and we wanted to help. So, we didn’t have the time to go to the full scale of doing the whole smart town thing. We hope to really be able to push that out next year. But in the meantime, we’re just kind of doing it like a residential service. It’s just a very powerful residential service. So we have the Command IQ app from Calix. It’s actually branded. It’s called Pea River Connect. And we’re able to see who’s connecting and what they’re doing and how they’re using it while it’s on each night. We do right now because it is the residential service. We are just turning it on and off again because we want to keep kids safe, right? We don’t want anybody to be able to get anything at any given time, you know. So we want to keep them protected. So we turn it on at 5:30 on Friday afternoons, and then we turn it off at 10:30 when the game is over. But hopefully by the time this time of season rolls around next year, we’ll have it all together, and we’ll be able to do it the right way.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay. So it is kind of, you know, it’s like MacGyvering.

Brenda Overton: That’s right. We were determined to make it happen, and we made it happen.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Excellent, excellent. Yeah. So how have folks responded to this?

Brenda Overton: Honestly, it’s been really good. So our CEO actually, like I said, his son is a player on one of the teams.

Megan McKoy-Noe: What’s his color?

Brenda Overton: Red.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay.

Brenda Overton: And they do a radio show. They’ve done it for years. It is so cool. Yes, they do. And Jeff, our CEO, he actually does the playbacks and things like that. So he was all about us getting fiber out there, because he wanted that high speed connection so that they could do the radio show and actually stream it online, you know. So yeah, it was fun. But anyway.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Wonderful. And then he has that little advertising.

Brenda Overton: Oh yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Opportunity that you do as well.

Brenda Overton: It’s double-edged for him.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So we talked a little bit about this, but the capacity at the stadium is 1,500-1,550.

Brenda Overton: Yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Round about.

Brenda Overton: Yeah. Yeah. Especially when it’s the rival game. When it’s the two schools that are local that are there playing, yeah. Then it gets up there.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Everybody shows up. So you mentioned wanting to make sure that the kids are safe when they’re there. You only turn it on for a certain amount of time. What else are you doing to make sure that the fans have a steady, reliable connection during peak game times when everyone’s streaming?

Brenda Overton: Right. We do have the CommandIQ, ProtectIQ turned on. So that makes sure that nobody’s getting hit with anything that they shouldn’t have. It’s also keeping our network safe. And because of the way we’ve got it set up, we’re able to make sure that everybody gets that good, reliable connection all of the time.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So you haven’t had issues?

Brenda Overton: No, ma’am. No, ma’am. And we’ve got great coverage all over. You can, even out in the parking lot. We kind of wanted to do a tailgate thing.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I was going to say you should. That could be fun.

Brenda Overton: Yeah, we’re working on it. Really small teams. So sometimes it makes it a little bit challenging to do everything that I want to do because it’s like there’s just not enough hours, Brenda.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I understand, but it’s all about the ideas and holding on to the ideas. We, you know, you just have an idea parking lot, right?

Brenda Overton: That’s right. And we do. We try. We try really hard to make it all come true. I have an amazing team. I would not trade anything for any of them. They are wonderful. And, so a lot of times they have to say, Brenda, we’re going to do it. But then it’s like the next thing you know, you blink your eyes and the time’s passed and I’m like, okay. But it’s just because we’re so busy. We’ve got so many things going on so.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, you talked about the name of the network, but you have a password for this as well, right?

Brenda Overton: Actually on this one, because of the way we have it set up and we wanted to use it for advertising, we just left this open. It’s just Pea River Broadband as the Wi-Fi SSID, and we just have it open and let them connect.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So no password. Nothing like that. They just pop on.

Brenda Overton: We wanted to make it easy again. Like I said, because it was so fast, I didn’t have the ability to do any kind of instructional video or even any kind of instructional handouts about how to get connected. I just wanted them to be able to get connected.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And that’s actually a good thing. You don’t want a bunch of instructional videos or handouts. People aren’t necessarily going to look at those.

Brenda Overton: That’s right.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Make it simple. Make it easy.

Brenda Overton: That’s right. We want it as easy as possible. I wanted them to actually be able to connect by just clicking the button, you know? And I know that may be naive on my part, but it’s been great. It’s been great so far.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well, no, and you have some security measures in place. So I love that. I think it’s an easy way to score with your future subscribers.

Brenda Overton: And that’s, I mean, outside of helping the community, which is what we were trying to do. It also, like I said, it is a great advertising, and it gives people that may not know if they want to make the choice for us to actually choose our service.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love it. Okay. Now how do you let folks know about this?

Brenda Overton: So we have a great relationship with PowerSouth, and they help us.

Megan McKoy-Noe: We love PowerSouth.

Brenda Overton: I know right. And they actually, bless them, they again amazing partners to work with. They printed banners and yard signs for me in less than a week. I’m not exaggerating. So we have banners over all of the fences. We have the signs.

Megan McKoy-Noe: What do they say?

Brenda Overton: Friday Night Lights provided by Pea River Cooperative. We don’t. We try to stay away from broadband and electric. We want everybody to know we’re the cooperative.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Which I think is really nice. I don’t know, a lot of folks, like folks have different names, but I love the way that you just made it Pea River Cooperative.

Brenda Overton: It was very important for us that everybody understood that it was Pea River, you know? And here we are. We’re not just doing electric anymore. We’re now doing broadband. We didn’t want a distinction. We wanted to keep that singular. But yeah, it’s just “Friday Night Lights provided by Pea River Broadband.” And then it’s just connect, you know, it’s that simple. Just connect.

Megan McKoy-Noe: This is just the name of the network, and then you’re set right now. Have you paired your Friday night Wi-Fi program with swag? I mean, do you have like for your team?

Brenda Overton: So we have done t-shirts for each of the schools.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Excellent.

Megan McKoy-Noe: The Ariton red and purple cats.

Brenda Overton: That’s right.

Megan McKoy-Noe: And the G.W. Long Rebels.

Brenda Overton: That’s right, that’s right. Yes. And so each school has their colors with it. So I’ll add a little bit more to that. We actually went through a brand change last year, and we included the community. Oh, yeah. So this was fun. This was so fun. So this started just before school got out last year.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Okay.

Brenda Overton: We knew we wanted to do something with the brand. We knew we wanted to do something with a logo. And we also knew that we wanted to do something to the community to let them know what we were doing, and we wanted to give them an input. So we did a “help us design our logo” contest with all of the students in every school in the three counties that we participate in. Now we, of course, put a disclaimer. It was help us design. It wasn’t necessarily, it wasn’t necessarily we’re going to use this as a logo, but give us the ideas, you know, help us come up with ideas. So, the winning student got a Switch, and the school got a check for $500. So it was again help get the community involved, you know. And we had, oh my gosh, probably 2,000 submissions. So then the staff of our office went through, and we picked, like the top ten best. There was about 20 of us that just kind of sat and looked, and we picked the top ten best, and then a group of about ten of us narrowed it down to three. And then our annual meeting is in July. So we let the membership choose the winner.

Megan McKoy-Noe: No.

Brenda Overton: And we did it anonymously. Like no one knew. We just we put little symbols on each of the three pictures. We had the poster boards up at our annual meeting sites, and we do our annual meeting a little bit different. We are actually set up at nine different stations in the three counties. So we go to the membership with our annual meeting instead of making them come to us. So it makes it really easy for them to participate. So the membership actually voted. They just picked a symbol. We had like a yellow triangle, a red square and a green circle, and they just picked the one that they liked the best, and they dropped it in the box. And we just counted it from there. And it was amazing. It was a great turnout. And I say all of that because we included the winning drawing is on the back of the t-shirt that we provided for the school. So it kind of even helped.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Can you describe it?

Brenda Overton: Yeah, it’s a set of power lines, poles with power lines on it. It’s got a string of fiber on it, and then it’s got our Pea River broadband on the bottom of it, I think is what it says. But it was really good. It was amazing. It was a high school sophomore like a boy, which is kind of odd because, you know, most of the time boys are like, “I’m not doing that.” But it was amazing. He was a sophomore, and he did such a good job.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I mean, you were offering a Switch.

Brenda Overton: That’s right. That’s right.

Megan McKoy-Noe: My kid also would have jumped into the fray on that one.

Brenda Overton: We also did a $1,000 scholarship for the winning student. But we were like, you know, we had it open to all ages. And we were like, you know, middle-aged kids, elementary school kids. A scholarship doesn’t mean much to them. Honestly, does a scholarship mean much to 15, 16 year olds? Probably not.

Megan McKoy-Noe: It’s a lot to the parents.

Brenda Overton: That’s right. That’s right. So we wanted to make sure we had the kids interest, so we had to throw something in fun that they would enjoy immediately. Yeah, yeah, it was good. It was really fun.

Megan McKoy-Noe: So and that was a drawing. How are you going to incorporate that outside of the shirt?

Brenda Overton: So we’ve used it actually on a lot of things that we do. Because we want it again, that we wanted that look, you matter. You know.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Yeah.

Brenda Overton: So we have it on a lot of stuff that we do throughout our office. A lot of our like social media posts and stuff will have it included in it. And we did take a piece of it and actually used in the logo. So at the bottom of the power lines, if you ever look at our logo now, the new logo has Pea River Cooperative. And it’s got the little, I don’t know if you can tell, but it’s like an extension cord. It’s got fiber Wi-Fi on one end and an extension plug on the other. So that actually came from the drawing. So we actually took part of that and included it into what our actual logo really is, yeah

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love involving the community in something like that. Having folks vote at nine different events for y’all’s annual meeting is brilliant.

Brenda Overton: It was so fun. And it got political. Like nobody, we didn’t know, like we didn’t let anybody know. Even myself, I didn’t know. I had a member of my staff who had no affiliation with anything. Take the names and, you know, take them. We numbered the drawings. We cut the bottoms off, numbered them so that we made sure. So nobody knew what was what.

Megan McKoy-Noe: But the kids knew.

Brenda Overton: But the kids knew. Yes. So when the kids found out who were the three top choices, they started politicking and like, go pick mine, go pick mine, go pick mine. So it was a lot of fun. It was so much fun.

Megan McKoy-Noe: I love that. Are you going to continue doing things like that, where you’re engaging your community and having them vote on things like grants in the community or?

Brenda Overton: I mean, so –

Megan McKoy-Noe: So much you could do with that.

Brenda Overton: Yeah, there is. And for me, we work for a cooperative. And, I mean, I live and breathe and believe with all of my heart that that member signs my paycheck at the end of the day. And so it’s my job to make sure that we are involved in them in everything we do. And we are including what they really want and what they really need in everything we do. So yeah, I love including the membership in anything that we’ve got going on. If I can make it happen, absolutely.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Oh, that’s just I love hearing about that. It’s a lot of fun. Now we started this conversation talking about football. And I want to ask you one last question before I let you go.

Brenda Overton: Okay.

Megan McKoy-Noe: If another utility wants to launch Friday Night Wi-Fi, maybe they have more than a month or two notice. So prepare now y’all. Think ahead.

Brenda Overton: Yes, yes, yes.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Right. What advice would you give them?

Brenda Overton: Do your homework. Make sure about, you know, where you’re going to place devices to make sure that you’ve got the coverage that you want everywhere that you want it. That’s important. Make sure that you can actually support everybody that connects. That’s also really important. You don’t want anybody to have a bad experience. And that was the one thing that I was adamant is like the experience has to be top notch. One of the things that we learned out of it, one of the schools that we installed at is the field is down lower than the street level, and it’s kind of weird. It’s kind of buried down. And we actually put the outdoor devices on light poles and we were too high. Which so initially it was like, “Okay, we’re not getting coverage at field level because we’re shooting so high over the field.” So we had to go make some modifications. We just, you know, fixed the attachment to the device and pointed it down some and that helped. I’ll also say, we live in a military territory, and we get a lot of interference with the 2.4 band on the devices. So we just turned it off. I mean, from our experience, you know, 2.4 is good, and like it has its purpose. And most of the time that’s like internet of things. It’s your smart home devices. It’s security cameras. It’s things like that. At the football game that wasn’t in the picture. Yeah, there may be some older cell phones that only work on 2.4, but it would be very minimal. So we just turn that radio off and just let it run on the 5G radio. And that changed it drastically. Yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: That is a wonderful tip.

Brenda Overton: So just keep that in mind. Yeah.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Well thank you so much for sharing your story with utility pioneers.

Brenda Overton: Absolutely.

Megan McKoy-Noe: She is Brenda Overton from Pea River Cooperative. And I’m your host, Megan McKoy at Pioneer Utility Resources.

Brenda Overton: Thank you.

Megan McKoy-Noe: Until we talk again, keep telling your story.

Brenda Overton: All right.

Outro: StoryConnect is produced by Pioneer Utility Resources, a communications cooperative that is built to share your story.