Are You REALLY Promoting Your Sports Program Correctly?
Ensuring the growth and longevity of your organization, Part 3By Special Contributor, Jube Dankworth, a completed homeschool Mom and Public Relations Pro and founder of Texas Home Educators.
Part 1 Part 2
Getting Your Game On
You've worked hard with your players, coaches and families to have a great football program. However, if only the families are attending your games, you are failing to reach the real community. Reaching the community helps bring more people to the games, selling more tickets and hot dogs, helping reduce the financial load on the players and their families. Let's go through the communication drill.
You have probably set up an email loop of some sort for your players and families. However, are you reaching the homeschool community? Read the rest…
First, consider having a volunteer position for communications. This would be the person or team who sets up the website, and social media pages for the team. There should be a model release included in your sign up papers to cover any pictures that might be used in the news or on the internet.
To reach the homeschool community, keep your website up to date on the games, try-outs and other activities. Next, have someone add the games to the email loop that your area homeschool groups use, such as yahoo groups, google groups or facebook groups. Be sure you have a parent on all these groups. This may take a communications team to reach all the homeschool groups in your area. They can then send an email or reminder each Thursday before the games. Also, consider adding some fun trivia to the game announcements, something about the players, or the team to pique interest in attending the games. Changing up the game announcement each week keeps it lively.
Finally, reach out to the whole community. Again, this helps your bottom line, and helps scouts know about your games. But also, by reaching out to the whole community, you will draw sponsors. If the games are well attended, the more likely businesses in the area would be willing to sponsor ads.
1. The basics, have the games listed on your website and social media sites.
2. Add the games to all media websites in your area. All media websites have a community calendar where you can add events for free. This will cover the radio stations, newspapers and TV stations in the area.
3. Connect with the sports bloggers in your area. Do a google search for “football your town blogger” This will bring up a list of sports bloggers that cover your town. DO NOT send them a press release. Just send them a friendly email with a link to your website, letting them know they are welcome to come to your game. You can even offer them a free ticket (but they would pay for their family attendance).
4. Meet and Greet. Stop by your stations with a one sheet in your hand. Ask to talk to the reporter who handles high school sports Just do a friendly hi, wanted to let you know about our team, hand over the one sheet, and leave.
5. After every game, send a press release to these reporters with the offer of pictures. Don't send the pictures initially because it will clog the email. Most emails with attachments wind up in the trash.
If you have parents willing to go the extra mile, flyers for churches, library bulletin boards, and grocery and laundry mat bulletin boards will also help you expand your game reach. Another simple plan is for families to invite their neighbors to a game. Remember, the more folks at the games, the lighter the financial load for the parents.
Now get your game on!
….to be continued…
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Part 1
Perhaps another way to ask this is: Have you done everything possible to “pick up” the next new family(ies), player(s), coach(es) or leader(s)? Back in 1997, when HSPN made its website accessible for organizations and teams to post their contact information it led to a huge array of posted team profiles that are now being found through Internet search engines. We’ll examine the components of a team profile in detail later. Your team profile on HSPN or other sites that you post to, however, is only the first step in “announcing” that you are open for business.
Every day, HSPN.net is searched and/or requests from families searching for a team are made. The possible scenarios are: a connection to you is made (thanks to your team profile) or worse: no connection is made – which happens more times than it should and in most cases can be corrected. Converting a missed connection to a successful one is the purpose of this special report.
My background as a homeschool coach/director for over 21 years, web developer and employee of a digital marketing firm makes this subject naturally interesting to me. Over the years, I have examined just about every homeschool sports related website and associated social media sites. Believe it or not, some websites were found by accident and some are really difficult to find. Sadly, for some, the only reference is MaxPreps, TeamSnap, eTeamz, etc. (not good!). There also seems to be a trend to shift everything to a closed Facebook group – not recommended either. And don’t get me started on sites that have content that is older than a year :)
In this series, I hope to shed some light on my suggestions that you might want to incorporate and consider, realizing that there are “no rules”, just ideas to help you maximum your invested efforts of your sports organization. While there is competition on the field, you know all too well that there is competition for players and infrastructure all the time.
As a preview of what is coming in part 2, I want you to browse your website using your favorite browser. Then shrink the size of the browser to the size of a smartphone and see what your website looks like – or just browse to it from other devices. How does it look?
Back to Part 3...
Part 2
In Part 1, I talked a little about the importance of a functioning website especially when viewed by a tablet or device. If you are assured of always having an influx of players and your teams are full, you can skip Part 2. For the rest of us, there are some basic reasons for having a current, easy to find, and easy to read website.
Are you aware of the type of visitors that may/will find your site? In no particular order:
• New families who may be relocating to your area – trust me, they do evaluate the sports scene as a criterion for where they might move next.
• New families contemplating the idea of signing up their child(ren) to play with your team.
• Coaches who may want to schedule with you
• Members of your organization will be looking at the site for all kinds of information, and you can figure that the kids will be using their smartphones.
• Media – reporters, etc., eventually track you down and will use your website for contact and schedule information.
• Scouts / Recruiters catch hold of your team name because of a player they are tracking and will be seeking information your site.
• Fans and spectators – want to know where and when you are playing so they can come watch. Who doesn’t want a large fan base?
• Alumni - throw out a special red carpet for your former players and let them know what is going on. The “NextGen” of coaches and donors will be our ALUMS!
• Others, such as organizers of future tournaments or leagues.
In my opinion, because you need to support the needs of a whole array of visitors, having one of those 3rd party team management websites like TeamSnap, eTeamz, MaxPreps, etc as you sole website is not the best practice. These are great as supplemental resources.
Perhaps, this graphic will help. This is our team locator system in action over the past couple of weeks: (click on image for larger size.) This snapshot gives you an idea of how vital it is for our team locator to link your team profile back to your website – more on that later.Homeschool SportsNet, now in its 18th year, is ranked #1 in web searches for “homeschool sports”. What does this mean for your? First of all, this means that ‘robots’ automatically crawl our site and indexes the content found on it. Second, this means that if your team profile is on our site, then you will get an extra “boost” in web searches as well. Third, this enhanced web search lets people find your team profile on HSPN, and then take advantage of all kind of links back to your site. We will cover the team profile next month.
Back to Part 3...
