Kathy Woolverton's Blogs

Anyone that has managed a sports league or club with multiple teams knows the challenge of keeping hundreds of people on many teams coordinated.

With many of the sports clubs run by volunteers, it can be even more of a challenge. With a lot of the info going around by email, it is hard to keep coordinated.

Using Synergy Connect community building social media web solution works well for groups such as sports teams and leagues.
This member communication solution can be added to any existing website.

Set up member categories for athletes, coaches, managers, referees, parents and fans.

Set up each team as a Group for communication. Groups can be private or public. The team manager can approve who are the team members in the group - including athletes, parents and coaches on a team.

You can also set up private discussion Groups for Coaches, Executive, Referrees, etc.

For games and tournaments, each team can add all their upcoming events, coordinate RSVPs for each upcoming event, send out event reminders, and other announcements.

It is always great fun being easily able to share photos with team mates!

One very interesting example is Vancouver Water Polo Club. Water polo is a great sport, but not well known. This clubs has teams for kids to play water polo in various age groups from age 6 and up.



For them, they needed a site they could easily update, and aid in member communication.

Also, like many organizations, they are trying to increase their marketing results. This is a challenge with no marketing budget and no dedicated marketing person. The Synergy Connect social networking site really helps in marketing the group.

Key is to be found at the top of the search engines, such as Google, when people are searching for the sport in your area.

For Search Engine Optimization, key factors include:
- the amount of relevant content,
- how often the site is updated, and
- number of links to your site.

For this group, key words they wanted to be found under were "Water Polo" and "Vancouver".

Within a few months from site creation, this site became # 1 in Google (of about 341,000 results) for Vancouver Water Polo! Exactly what they ideally wanted to achieve.

Key to this success, is a lot more content which mentions the key words that are important for this group to be found in the search engine.

With very photo and announcement that the members add, there is automatically more targetted content for the search engines to find.

Even for a small club, adding Synergy Connect community building social media web solution, helps in both member communication and marketing efforts.

How about your hockey, soccer, baseball, football, swim, basketball or other club? What would you like to achieve for your organization?