Interview
The Gist
- Dual mission, dual experience. USA Swimming balances Olympic-level athlete support with grassroots swim club engagement, tailoring digital strategies for both audiences.
- “Goggles On” unites the swim journey. Their flagship campaign connects elite swimmers to beginners through a universal symbol—putting on goggles—resonating across video, social, and web.
- Tech upgrade fuels personalization. A new data warehouse, automation tools, and revamped web architecture enable USA Swimming to deliver tailored experiences to 200+ personas.
Dom Nicastro, editor-in-chief at CMSWire, sits down with Jacob Grosser, managing director of marketing and communications for USA Swimming, for a wide-ranging conversation on how the national governing body for swimming combines elite athlete support and community engagement into a unified digital strategy.
From Olympics-level storytelling to hyper-personalized swim time dashboards, Grosser unpacks how USA Swimming approaches its marketing infrastructure, launching video-rich brand campaigns like “Goggles On,” and investing in platforms that serve both professional athletes and everyday swim club members. It’s a playbook in digital modernization, data strategy and customer experience design—one where every swimmer, from toddler to Olympian, has a place.
Table of Contents
- USA Swimming’s Digital Mission: Serving Fans and Members
- Goggles On: USA Swimming’s Olympic Marketing Moment
- Driving Conversion, Youth Engagement and Regional Growth
USA Swimming’s Digital Mission: Serving Fans and Members
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro, editor in chief of CMSWire.com, here for our latest edition of CMSWire TV's The Digital Experience, the CMSWire TV show. We have three of them. And we are here with Jacob Grosser. He is the managing director of marketing and communications for USA Swimming. What’s up, Jacob?
Jacob Grosser: Hey, glad to be here.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, and I’m glad I did my swimming thing. I don’t think anyone would know what swimming is if I didn’t do that. So it's very helpful. All right—USA Swimming. I know what it is. I’m into sports journalism—that’s where I started. But let’s lay out the foundation: Who does USA Swimming serve? What does it do? And who are your main customers, so to speak?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, that last one’s kind of the million-dollar question for us strategically. In general, we are the national governing body for swimming in the United States. The first part is pretty intuitive and what most people know us for: That’s helping with coaching and management of our national team, which competes at the Olympics and other international competitions.
But we’re also very much a grassroots organization. We have almost 400,000 members across the country and over 2,500 individual clubs that we are responsible for from a governance standpoint. That’s really who our main customer is—we serve those clubs. They’re the ones with boots on the ground in their local communities. Supporting and empowering those individual swim clubs as part of the larger USA Swimming family is very much what we focus on.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, so you would put those club members as the highly targeted customers. They’re the ones on your email list. They’re the ones you want to make your website great for. And the people who join their club—by extension, sort of sub-customers. Or do you treat even an eight-year-old who’s starting swimming for the first time as a customer too?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, very much—everyone is a customer. We treat different groups or stakeholder personas differently within our strategies, and that’s intentional. The website is a great example. Our website has to be two distinct things. It has to serve casual browsers—fans, parents, the general public. The idea is, if someone’s interest is sparked in swimming and they come to our site, we need to be able to welcome them and guide them through what’s most interesting.
At the same time, we have a lot of specialized members—individual head coaches, local swim committees (LSCs), admin members, officials. There are a lot of resources and requirements specific to those groups that need to be housed on the website as well. So it has to balance a general engagement website with a highly functional member resource hub, and that’s where many of our digital experience challenges lie.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah. What was the last big event? I’m guessing it might’ve been the Olympics. Or was there something else after that?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, I guess it depends on what you consider big. We had the Olympics—and we were really pleased with the successes we had there. But we actually finished the year with our Short Course World Championships. Our team had a historic performance there: 21 world records, we won the medal table, and really rewrote the record books in terms of what can happen at an individual meet. So we finished 2024 strong. Right now we’re in a couple months of training before we get back to competition this spring, leading into this summer’s U.S. Nationals and then World Championships in Singapore.
Goggles On: USA Swimming’s Olympic Marketing Moment
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: So when a gold medal happens—it's in the hand of a USA swimmer—does Jacob Grosser say, “That’s gold marketing”? Here it comes. I’m assuming you like gold medals.
Jacob Grosser: It is yes *and*. And for two reasons. One, it’s obviously great to get the recognition for the sport itself. But we take a very athlete-first approach to our marketing. We think that’s what makes our sport appealing. Those are the stories we want to tell, and the athletes are who we want to highlight. So yes, when we’ve got an athlete accepting a gold medal, we’ve got a specific marketing and communications cadence around celebrating that achievement. And it all feeds into our broader athlete-first strategy.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, athlete first. Tell me about some of the marketing campaigns from the Olympics. Was there a big website revamp or an email campaign or some kind of social media? I’m sure it was all of those things, but was there one big one that kept you and your marketing team up late?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah. We launched a new national brand marketing campaign last year called Goggles On.
The reason we called it that is because it celebrates a shared moment across all levels of our sport. When you go to your first swim lesson, there’s that moment when you put your goggles on and get ready. That same moment happens for Katie Ledecky when she stands behind the blocks in Paris to win her fourth consecutive gold. And even for master swimmers later in life, there’s still that moment before you dive in when the goggles go on.
So that’s the name and meaning behind the campaign. The idea was to harness the Olympic spike in interest and direct it toward sustained engagement. We know every four years the attention surges, so we built the campaign to drive people to our website, where we worked hard to optimize and create materials that would effectively introduce newcomers to the sport and guide them toward joining.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah. And how do you measure the success of a campaign like Goggles On? I’m sure it’s a lot of web analytics—like what happened on the website, what happened in terms of memberships. What are some of those core KPIs you're watching during and after the Olympics?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, you hit on two of the big three. First, the general marketing analytics—impressions, clicks, reach, and engagement across social and paid digital. Ultimately, that’s driving traffic to our website, so we evaluate what impact it had. How many people are we reaching compared to non-Olympic years? Or previous Olympic years? That gives us a strong benchmark.
And ultimately, membership is the third big one. We’re a membership organization. While it’s not always a 1:1 ratio from campaign to registration, it’s a great indicator and gives us anecdotal feedback about how well the campaign is landing.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I love the “Goggles On” idea. I’m a baseball guy—I coached Little League and played in college—so I’m thinking of the one thing every baseball player does. They slap their glove and get ready for a play. Whether you're in tee ball or the majors, that’s a shared moment. That’s your equivalent. It ties the Ledeckys of the world to the three-year-old at their first lesson. What kind of feedback did you get on the campaign?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, really great feedback. You hit the nail on the head. We have some video assets in the campaign that showcase our national team athletes as kids. There’s a great video with Regan Smith—a world record holder and gold medalist—swimming when she’s six or seven. It fades into her at Olympic Trials and the Olympic Games. It ties it all together. At one point, Katie Ledecky was just starting out too.
That’s the whole point—we want new swimmers to feel like they’re starting the same journey. We’ve had a lot of great feedback and are seeing strong results from that strategy.
Driving Conversion, Youth Engagement and Regional Growth
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, and at the end of the day, conversion-wise, what are you trying to accomplish for USA Swimming with these types of campaigns? Is it general awareness—like, let’s drive them to the website and maybe they realize, “Hey, I have a small club, maybe we should affiliate with USA Swimming”? What’s the ultimate conversion goal?
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Jacob Grosser: Yeah, it’s kind of a two-pronged strategy. At the national governing body level here at headquarters, we’re very much in that branding space—trying to create a positive affiliation with the sport. The other prong is working with individual clubs. We’ve done a lot to provide templated marketing materials to help those clubs promote themselves locally.
The way our sport and registration works, you don’t come to the USA Swimming website and just sign up. You join a local swim club that’s affiliated with us, and that’s how you become a member. So we focus on seeding that awareness and positive sentiment at the national level, while also empowering clubs with the tools to bring people in at the local level.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah. And swimming is such an old-school sport. It’s just a person in a pool trying to get to the other end. What kind of excitement have you seen at the youth level? I know a lot of national organizations are trying to drive growth there. Baseball, for instance—my sport—has struggled a bit. One of my former colleagues is doing a “Baseball Isn’t Boring” campaign. Is there a hard connection to youth that you’re trying to make through marketing?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, definitely. That’s the base from which we operate. The bigger the base, the better chance we have to find the next Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps. So we’re focused on growing that membership base.
You mentioned the simplicity—it’s true. First one to the wall wins. But there’s so much nuance. That’s where our storytelling strategy comes in. Watching bodies swim back and forth isn’t always compelling on its own. But when you know the personalities, the rivalries, the training journeys—that’s when it gets engaging.
At the youth level, we’re using our website and mobile app to celebrate individual successes. What’s great about swimming is that even if you finish fifth, you might’ve set a personal best. You beat a previous version of yourself. And that’s a win. Swimming’s been shown to support academic performance and multi-sport success too, so there are a lot of angles we’re leaning into.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah. And I assume social media and video are your key platforms for storytelling. I don’t know that 10-year-olds are diving into the blog section, but it’s important for SEO. You probably use search to pull them in, then lead them to video. Are your video metrics strong?
Jacob Grosser: Yes—and growing rapidly. That’s by design. Video is king, and content is king. Last year, we launched our own OTT platform: the USA Swimming Network. It’s an app on mobile, desktop, and connected TV—anywhere content is consumed. And it doesn’t just include content from us—it features channels from creators across the swimming world.
It’s free for consumers and meant to help immerse them in the sport, including the personalities of our athletes. So when it comes time for live streams, fans already know the stories. It’s a deep engagement strategy.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: One thing about a national organization like yours—you must have state-level affiliations too, right? Like Massachusetts Swimming, Connecticut Swimming?
Jacob Grosser: Absolutely. We call them local swim committees (LSCs). We have 59 of them—Indiana Swimming, Illinois Swimming, and so on. Some larger states like California or Florida have multiple LSCs. These act as intermediaries between the national organization and local clubs. So we’ve got national, regional, and local strategies all working together.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I imagine you’re also looking at the data regionally—like gains in the Northeast, drop-offs in the Southwest. Are you tailoring marketing strategies at the regional level?
Jacob Grosser: Yes, and that’s actually a big focus in 2025. I wouldn’t say it’s brand new, but it’s a more enhanced strategy. We’re using our data technology to get granular—identifying markets where we’ve lost membership or see growth opportunities. We’re working closely with those LSCs and focusing on key regions where data shows we can regain or grow.
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Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Cool. Right.
Jacob Grosser: Working in partnership with those local swim committee volunteers and admins to make sure that we're adding that extra layer of support in those regions to drive membership—and then largely, not staying out of the way, but looking at areas that are more successful and keying in on the best practices that are happening there. We help equip some of those other places that may be lagging a bit in membership to borrow from the approaches of our top performers and rebuild growth.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire
Yeah, like the North Dakota marketing for USA Swimming might be different than Florida's, you know, in that sense.
Jacob Grosser: Exactly. Yeah, there's regional aspects to it. And then when you look at things like Florida, there's a lot of water safety messaging because swimming is the only sport that can save your life—and drowning is an epidemic for us. The messaging there is very specific, especially with how much water access people have and how much time they spend in the ocean and Gulf. That type of tailored approach is exactly what we look at.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah. All right. We talked about a lot of the front-facing marketing communications, you know, experiences and stuff like that. Let's get nerdy, shall we? Talk about the data and digital architecture. We know there was a recent implementation of a data warehouse. Am I understanding that right?
Jacob Grosser: Yeah. Yes. So we're looking to—this year is one of our focuses—implementing a data warehouse, really with the main purpose of just providing faster, better features to help engage our users. We deal with a lot of data. You wouldn't think of data necessarily with swimming, but we have our SwimTimes database, a proprietary, homegrown database that is the predominant SwimTimes database for the entire world. It has hundreds of millions of times in it. And that's really what our sport is about.
When I was talking about that individual athlete progression—you’re racing other athletes, but you're also racing the clock and a previous version of yourself. So ingesting, manipulating and presenting those times in a compelling way through reporting is a major focus for us in 2025. A data warehouse will help us do that and manage that big dataset.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Now, who is the target audience there? SwimTime reporting—explain that to me. Who uses it, and what outcomes are they looking for?
Jacob Grosser: Really, in our sport, almost everyone is involved with it in some form. From an athlete perspective, it's about comparing previous times—am I progressing season to season? Which strokes am I progressing in? Am I reaching my goal times? Coaches might want to say, how is this athlete progressing versus another? How do clubs or LSCs compare nationally? And from our standpoint, at the high-performance level, we look at aggregate top times across age groups. Are those tracking with historical norms, or do we need to address pipeline development? Everyone uses the data differently, and our goal is to present that flexibly based on the use case.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, so if I’m a swimmer, I want to log in and look at my Q3 performances—you’re trying to make that intuitive. Seamless.
Jacob Grosser: Yes, exactly. It’s about accessing the right information quickly through personalized reporting and making it user-friendly. For parents and athletes, our updates to the website, dashboards, and mobile app are all about clarity. We’re even gamifying progress for youth athletes—badges for certain time standards. The data’s the same, but how we personalize and visualize it is what drives engagement.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, so it’s kind of a marketing data goldmine. And this implementation will land sometime in 2025?
Jacob Grosser: Yes. We already use a form of it, but we’re taking it to the next level—faster, more flexible reporting, better stakeholder feedback. And that’s key: we’re not sitting at headquarters making assumptions. We’re using surveys and conversations to align technology with real-world user needs.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: And you mentioned the mobile experience too—what are your 2025 agenda items there? Is mobile where most members engage?
Jacob Grosser: Yes, mobile is taking over. There are some holdouts, but we’re thinking mobile-first. There are many apps for swim-specific needs, but there’s no one-stop shop. That’s where we believe USA Swimming—as the national governing body—can step in. From gamified youth features to coach resources, parent dashboards, and admin tools, we’re building toward a unified app experience, centered around swim times.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: It’s been 25 minutes and we haven’t mentioned AI. What’s your stance? Are you implementing it in any way?
Jacob Grosser: We’re definitely active in automation. I want to separate that from AI though. We’re keeping tabs on AI, but most of our progress has been in automation. As a relatively small national governing body, it helps us scale. First, through our marketing automation system—email, customer journeys, dynamic content. We have over 200 personas, so whether it’s welcoming a new member or providing Olympic-trial qualifying coaches with tailored info, these journeys are set up to run smart and lean.
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Jacob Grosser: The other automation area is elite athlete analytics—measuring strokes per second, reaction time, flip turns. We’re advancing real-time capture and analysis for coaches at events. And the goal is flexible frameworks—so if a coach wants to know “who’s the fastest from flags to flags,” the system can support that query. That’s where we see AI lightly entering: automating video and sensor-based insights in real time.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Are you able to benchmark internationally—China, Europe, etc.?
Jacob Grosser: Not through formal data sharing—it’s competitive. But we analyze international events where all countries compete. With the right tech, we can capture and automate what used to be manual data entry—stroke recognition, timing patterns, all that. That’s what will help drive smarter performance modeling.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: You said 200 personas. CMSWire has six and that feels like a lot sometimes!
Jacob Grosser: Yeah, and that’s part of the challenge. There’s a hierarchy—we’re one USA Swimming family, but we operate with over 200 different personas. We’ve undergone a full digital transformation in the last few years, updating 20-year-old systems. Now we’re in a position to activate that tech stack for personalization, gamification, performance metrics—all of it.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: So you did a martech audit to streamline and modernize?
Jacob Grosser: Yes. We were doing a lot with spreadsheets, and we knew we needed to level up. We’re best-in-class as a swim nation, so our systems had to match that. We’ve made major progress in building out modern infrastructure.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: And I’m guessing you’ve learned that no one platform does it all. Third-party tools still need to integrate.
Jacob Grosser: Exactly. We’ve got specialized plugins, but our real strength is in the architecture and team alignment. Developers understand marketing needs, marketers understand tech goals. That alignment helps us build roadmaps that work across business units.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: One last thing. By the end of 2025, what do you most hope gets done?
Jacob Grosser: All of it matters, but for me, it starts and ends with the website. It’s the first and most frequent touchpoint. During past Olympic trials, our website crashed. For 2024, we partnered with Visus to fix that. They showed us how even one small code error could cascade into disaster. Thanks to them, we scaled the site to handle Olympic-level traffic—and it performed flawlessly.
Jacob Grosser: Now we want to keep optimizing. Think SEO. People aren’t always navigating to your site directly—they’re searching. We need the first search link to take them exactly where they need to go. That’s the biggest focus for 2025 as we head toward the LA 2028 Olympic Games.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Absolutely. We’ll be watching. And hey, I may not make Team USA, but I’ll still check it all out!
Jacob Grosser: There’s still time to put those goggles on. Swimming is a lifelong sport—it’s healthy, inclusive, and yes, it can save your life. That’s the heart of our “Goggles On” campaign.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Totally agree. It’s the best full-body workout I know. Jacob Grosser, thank you so much for joining us on the Digital Experience Show. Looking forward to what’s next for USA Swimming!
Jacob Grosser: Thanks, Dom. I appreciate it.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: All right—have a great one!
