How Indiana University turned a viral moment into a story about people, not just points
During Indiana University's game against Penn State, wide receiver Omar Cooper Jr. hauled in a game-winning catch with 36 seconds left on the clock. Minutes later, a message landed in IU's inbox: a husband and wife, both IU alumni, sharing that her water broke the exact moment the catch happened.
Jill Trimbach (
That single exchange captures what Jill's team was really managing during IU's historic playoff run: not just a football story, but thousands of individual moments of connection, arriving faster than any team could have anticipated.
The moment everything changed
Before the run, IU's Smart Inbox in Sprout Social handled roughly 220 messages a day. That was the baseline Jill's team had built their workflows around.
Then the postseason hit.
- December 2025: inbox volume averaged 501 messages a day, spiking to nearly 3,000 messages over the December 6 to 7 weekend of the Big Ten Championship
- January 2026: average volume climbed to 1,263 messages a day, totaling 39,176 messages for the month
- For comparison, IU's busiest weeks before the football run were 2025 commencement week at 2,052 messages and 2025 homecoming week at 3,609 messages, both now dwarfed by a single January in the championship run
To keep up, Jill's core team pulled in reinforcements from across the university: fellows, interns, members of the internal communications team, multimedia journalists, email marketing staff, editors and research writers, all stepping away from their day jobs to help hold the line. IU leadership now points to that stretch when they talk about what social media can do for the university as a whole, not only for its athletics program.
"We're huge fans of the approval workflows, and we added more senior social media members to have approving power so we could increase our post volume." — Jill Trimbach, Executive Director of Social Media, Indiana University
The how
Cross-training 20 people who had never worked a social inbox, in the middle of a live news cycle, could have been a recipe for burnout or brand risk. Instead, new team members were up to speed in about 20 minutes.
- Settings for new user success: Custom permissions kept accidental posts and replies off the table, and platform filtering split the team by channel so 20 people could work the same inbox without working on top of each other. A case management system gave new teammates a clear way to hand off anything sensitive to the core social media experts, while spam detection cut the noise.
- Protecting quality at a higher volume: Experienced senior team members got expanded approval power to scale post volume without sacrificing quality control, and the team pre-built placeholder posts that any of the recently on-ramped team members could review ahead of time. That system is what made an unfamiliar job survivable for a team of people borrowed from other functions operating under a national spotlight.
- Staying fast under record pressure: On National Championship game day, compared to the Rose Bowl weeks earlier, IU's team cut its response time by two-thirds, with most replies landing in under five minutes, despite fielding 6,735 messages from kickoff through 2 a.m. A tool didn't absorb that volume. Extending the team of people using the tool did.
- Listening for what fans actually needed: Tagging let the team track postseason content in one place while catching emerging fan conversations, like the rise of quarterback Fernando Mendoza as a Heisman contender under the tag #HeIsMendoza. That same listening approach helped the team notice repetitive questions from new fans early enough to get ahead of them with a dedicated FAQ post, which reached 336,400 impressions, 40,022 engagements and a 12% engagement rate.
- Helping fans connect in person: A Schedule of Events post ahead of the Big Ten Championship helped fans find parking, events and gathering spots around Indianapolis, earning 684,108 impressions and 43,550 engagements while helping pack Lucas Oil Stadium with Hoosier fans.
"We understood precisely what was driving audience engagement and were able to directly triangulate our content accordingly. Take our social amplification of our out-of-home Times Square activation, where we not only celebrated Mendoza’s Heisman win, but seamlessly integrated key proof points about top-ranked academic programs. Particularly on social, we made football the front door to IU’s excellence on and off the field.” — Jonathan Coffington - Vice President and Chief Communications and Marketing Officer
The business impact
Reporting on impressions, engagement rate and audience growth gave university leadership a clear picture of what social had become during the run: not just a marketing channel, but a front door where fans, families and alumni felt genuinely heard. Tagged data also let the team show how many of those eyes landed on academic and brand priorities alongside football, evidence that the moment lifted the entire university, not just its athletics program.
That same door opened wider than IU expected. An October post celebrating IU's alumni network was picked up and replayed multiple times on The Pat McAfee Show, much like the story of the championship catch that introduced a new baby into the world alongside a nationally televised moment of joy. Both started as a single social post, which was carried by a borrowed team of social media practitioners, that was led by a strategy designed to remain authentically Indiana University, at scale.
What could this kind of connection look like for your team?
How has your team weathered times of immense pressure? Any tips for others facing a similar situation. The Arboretum community is here to brainstorm together how your team could turn a high-pressure moment into a bigger story about your audience and your brand.