How a conference office tells the stories of eight campuses and 24 sports.

September 18, 2026

A conference office covers everything, but lives in the middle.

Member schools have their own communicators, their own websites, their own game days. The conference office is responsible for the parts no single campus can handle alone: championships, awards, all-conference honors, and the storytelling that makes eight separate athletic departments feel like one league. All of it depends on information that lives somewhere else.

For Ali (Wilson) Becker, Associate Commissioner of the American Rivers Conference, that’s the job. It’s also the bottleneck.

“As a conference office, we’re responsible for supporting a large number of sports, institutions, championships, awards, and student-athletes, often with a very small staff,” Becker said. “There are a lot of moving pieces, and the volume of content can be challenging to manage.”

Who: American Rivers Conference (A-R-C)
Division: NCAA Division III
Member Institutions: 8
Sports Sponsored: 24
Headquarters: Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Founded: 1922, as the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Association
FanWord Partner Since: June 2024
Fun Fact: The conference adopted its current name in 2018 to reflect its Iowa roots and a growing regional footprint.

Challenge: Information living on eight campuses

Every story the American Rivers Conference tells starts somewhere else.

A student-athlete worth featuring is on a roster in Cedar Rapids or Lincoln or Pella. A coach with something to say is somewhere on another campus, between practices. A championship storyline may be buried in results from a weekend spread across the region.

Before any of it becomes a conference release, someone has to go get it. Becker used to do that by hand.

“Before FanWord Assist, my workflow was very manual,” she said. “We were gathering information from member institutions, identifying potential storylines, and then manually turning those into releases, web stories, social media content, and other communications.”

The difficulty of manually-driven content work is that the volume of work is never spread equally. With a small conference office and 24 sponsored sports, the collection work most often piled up when the calendar was busiest, meaning the storytelling that came during the tightest windows of the year put the toughest strain on the department.

By her own account, it wasn’t happening often enough or in a format the conference was proud of.

For many small conference offices, this is the most difficult part. Most Division III communications shops run somewhere between one and four people, and budgets across all of small college athletics are tightening rather than growing. Championships still get run. Awards still get announced.

But the features, the athlete profiles, and the pieces that give a league a personality? Those become the work you do if there’s time left over, and there rarely is.

“With a small conference office staff, it’s easy for storytelling to become something we get to when time allows,” Becker said.

Solution: Collection and creation in the same place

FanWord Assist’s features for conferences changed the American Rivers Conference’s approach to both gathering and writing.

The ‘Online Interviews’ feature of FanWord Assist lets the conference office send questions directly to student-athletes, coaches, and staff across all eight member institutions, then collect responses in the same platform where the stories get built. The A-R-C has gathered responses much more efficiently through the tool, which then feed the long-form features the office publishes.

Consolidating those steps is what Becker points to first.

“I have personally enjoyed everything being in one spot together inside FanWord Assist for feature stories and interviews,” she said. “This has made the workflow more simple, and honestly, easier.”

The platform became the archive as well as the workspace. For Becker, ease of use is one of the reasons the platform functions as a storage tool for responses and images. Because student-athletes, coaches, and other stakeholders can respond via text, audio, or video formats, the uploaded content can be repurposed elsewhere.

But that’s just the beginning.

Now, her day starts by taking that interview material, automatically synopsizing the content, and creating a first draft that already has shape. As opposed to assembling raw material and then facing a blank page, she spends her valuable time on judgment and editing instead of construction.

“Instead of starting from scratch every time, we can use the information available to quickly identify storylines and develop content,” Becker said. “That gives us a much more efficient starting point and allows myself to spend more time on editing, adding the A-R-C voice and context, and thinking strategically about how we want to tell the story.”

She’s direct about where the platform’s assistance ends, too.

“FanWord hasn’t replaced the human side of our communications process, but it has made that process more efficient,” she said. “I still review, edit, and shape everything before it goes out, but I find myself starting from a much better place.”

In their time as a FanWord partner, the A-R-C has published 122 feature stories across its membership, like these:

• “Once in a Lifetime Experience for Nebraska Wesleyan’s Kayla Hepler at the 2024 Paris Olympics”
• Feature Friday: Averie Hike, Nebraska Wesleyan University

Bonus: A tool that already speaks the language

Becker didn’t arrive as an easy convert. “I am always transparent with people that I was very skeptical at the beginning of using AI, but have grown to enjoy using it,” she said.

She also isn’t evaluating FanWord in a vacuum. She uses plenty of AI tools, and she’s clear about what separates this one.

“There are so many AI tools out there now, and trust me I use a lot of them to assist with workflows, but FanWord is a tool made specifically for athletics and that is what makes it so useful,” she said. “You do not have to train FanWord on what sports are compared to some other AI tools. Sure, AI is not perfect, but FanWord gets you started in the right direction right away.”

That distinction is easy to underestimate until you’ve tried the alternative. A general-purpose model needs to be taught the context and vocabulary before it can be useful: what a save percentage means in one sport and a save means in another, why a game-winning moment takes focus, how an all-conference selection is worded. Every session starts with instruction.

FanWord is built for college sports, with all of the context, language, and sport-specific intricacies built in. For a conference office covering 24 sports with a handful of people, building content from a starting point that is trained on great sportswriting creates immense value.

Result: 316 hours saved and a membership that appreciates the coverage

The American Rivers Conference has saved 316 hours since partnering with FanWord roughly two years ago.

The clearest signal, though, came from the eight campuses the office serves. Conference offices don’t often get feedback on volume, but the schools have been tracking the difference.

“The membership has noticed more consistent coverage for feature stories,” Becker said. “And the conference office has received positive feedback on the amount of feature stories pushed out each year from the A-R-C.”

That’s the outcome the partnership was built for.

Becker framed the original goal as trading repetitive process for strategy and storytelling, and three years in, the trade is holding. Practically, that means more coverage, faster turnarounds, and room for the initiatives a small conference office would otherwise never reach.

“We are going into year three with FanWord and the partnership has been amazing,” she said. “Not just the platform, but the people with FanWord are some of the best in the business.”

Behind every conference are stories worth telling

Conference communicators sit between the campuses and the coverage, responsible for the storytelling no single school can do alone and dependent on information that lives somewhere else. Across the country, they’re asked to do more with less at every level.

FanWord Assist is built to help — with sport-specific game recaps for 20 sports, award nominations, XML and non-XML website player bios, online interviews, and storytelling tools designed for the people who cover college athletics.

From Division I departments to conference offices like the A-R-C that are the heartbeat of small college athletics, the time savings add up.

Learn More: FanWord Assist’s features for conference offices.

See what FanWord can do for your communications team: 
➡️ Request a demo using the contact form below
➡️ Reach out to our CEO directly to talk through your team’s workflow
➡️ Read more case studies: Florida Southern — Tulsa — Illinois Tech — Hamline — KCKCC — Stetson — Northwestern College