Cavaliers Operating Company, LLC

Policy Patrol allows the Cavaliers Operating Company to easily add uniform and promotional email signatures and to add user-based legal disclaimers.

Company background
The Cavaliers Operating Company owns and operates the Cleveland Cavaliers professional basketball team, also known as the “Cavs”. The Cavs first joined the National Basketball Association (NBA) as an expansion team in 1970. The Cavs have since been led by legendary coaches including Bill Fitch, Chuck Daly, Lenny Wilkens and many more. With the acquisition of first round draft pick LeBron James in 2003 and under the direction of Coach Mike Brown, the Cavs are headed towards a promising future.

The Cavaliers Operating Company also owns and operates the Quicken Loans Arena (nicknamed “The Q”), home of the Cleveland Cavaliers. Each year Quicken Loans Arena hosts close to 1.5 million people that attend approximately 200 events including Cavaliers basketball, world-class concerts, spectacular family shows and signature sporting events.

Business challenge
The Cavaliers Operating Company heavily depends on email for communicating with the public, their basketball players, artists, ticket agencies and other parties. As the organization grew, the branding of its email messages started to lack uniformity. The legal department also became increasingly aware of the legal risks involved in sending confidential and sensitive emails and was looking for ways to protect against this risk.

Consolidate image
Their 200 full-time employees and 800 part-time employees were all creating their own signatures. Some of them included the company logo in their signature, some of them used colored fonts and bold formatting and others did not include a signature at all. The company was looking for a way to easily achieve uniformity and ‘broadcast’ the same corporate message and branding in all their emails, without having to configure each signature individually.

Promotional opportunity
In addition to basketball games, the Quicken Loans Arena hosts many different events including concerts and shows such as Justin Timberlake and Disney on Ice. The Cavaliers Operating Company wanted to include information about their upcoming events in their emails, but did not want to be faced with the administrative burden of having to constantly update each individual’s signature with the latest information.

Legal requirements
The company was sending out sensitive and confidential information via email. The legal department was aware of the risks involved in sending out sensitive information via email, but still needed to continue to use email as the primary means of communication. Also the legal department only wanted to add disclaimers to their emails, not to the emails sent by other users.

Solution
Ed Kordel, Director of Information Technology, started the search for a solution that would solve their uniformity issues and provide them with an easy way to include the latest event information in their signatures. In addition they required a program that would allow them to add a user-based email disclaimer to protect against legal liability. ‘I downloaded and installed Policy Patrol and found it extremely intuitive and easy to deploy. Within two days of installing the product we were fully operational and our signatures and disclaimers were just the way we wanted them’, says Kordel.

The Cavaliers Operating Company use Policy Patrol in the following ways:

Signatures
Policy Patrol adds a signature to each outgoing message including a company logo and animated gifs announcing upcoming events. ‘Since Policy Patrol allows us to make use of Active Directory merge fields, the administration effort is close to zero’ says Kordel. ‘We simply created one signature that is automatically personalized for each user. Another neat feature is Policy Patrol’s ability to position signatures on replies and forwards after the last entered message text instead of at the bottom of the email’.

Disclaimers
By configuring user based email disclaimers in Policy Patrol, the company was able to only append disclaimers for the legal department and not for any other users. ‘This provided us with the flexibility that we were after’, says Kordel.

Benefits
Consolidate professional image
The Cavaliers Operating Company can now rest assured that each email that is sent out is stamped with their company’s uniform signature without the administrative burden of having to configure or update individual signatures.

Utilize promotional opportunity
By automatically appending animated .gifs or static ads to email signatures, the company can inform its stakeholders and the general public about upcoming events. Since the company wide signature is configured within one single template, keeping the signature current is a breeze.

Legal risks minimized
By adding a disclaimer to outgoing emails, the legal department’s sensitive emails are now more protected, minimizing the risks of (accidental) breach of confidentiality, negligent misstatement and non-intentional binding of contracts.

www.theqarena.com