Things get a little crazy once your teams start playing. Everyone is going 100 mph in all different directions. How do you keep up communication with your volunteers and with the parents as the season progresses?
Chances are, you are relying heavily on the phone. If you have a last minute schedule change or other important news to get out, you can get your volunteers busy calling all of the parents. This takes time and energy from your coaches and other volunteers. What if you could develop a strong habit of communication using email and the internet? You could put out the info you need to put out just once, and all of the parents could be kept up to date.
If you want to move more of your communication online, it is important to plan ahead, be organized, and stick with it. Also, using the right tools will make it so much easier.
Plan Ahead
If you have always communicated one way, you can’t just throw the switch one day to a new form of communication and expect it to work out. If you are going to develop a strong communication strategy for your league, think it through first. For instance, email and web are a great way to stay in touch with the majority of people. However, there will be a few people who cannot access the internet regularly. Do you have a secondary plan for them?
You will also want to plan ahead so that you can alert your parents at the beginning of the season. If schedules and cancellations are going to be posted on your web site and notices are going to be delivered via email, make sure you let the parents know this at the beginning of the season. You will also need to collect everyone’s email address.
You are also going to have to find the right tools to communicate. These might include an easy to update website, an email service, or group organization tool. Below, I will tell you about MemberHub, an organization tool that can help in keeping communication strong.
Be Organized
To keep communication strong throughout the sports season, you are going to have to be organized. You need a way for information to move from various sources, including coaches and volunteers, to a main launching point. From there, it will have to go out to parents, and if you can do it on a regular basis that will be best.
Stick With It
You will want to commit to keeping the communication going regularly. Parents and volunteers will then develop habits of checking their email and your site for important information. If you don’t keep up with it regularly, everyone will fall back to old ways of communication.
MemberHub
We are big proponents of MemberHub because it is so easy. It is a organization and collaboration tool for larger groups. For your league, you would set up an organization that you would invite all parents and volunteers to join. Then, you would create individual hubs for each team and volunteer committee. This way, you can communicate to everyone at once, or you can communicate to particular people. If a coach wants to post stats for his team, he can do it on his hub and only the parents of those kids will get the information. This would also be very helpful for cancellations, volunteers needing to coordinate, and more.
MemberHub offers tools such as calendar, discussion, photo and file sharing, and whiteboards. Users can elect to receive notifications via email or even text message. As an overarching communication tool for your league, it can’t be beat!
Once you come up with a communication plan and stick with it, you will find that running things gets much easier. Using a tool like MemberHub will streamline the whole thing. Before long, you will wonder how you operated without a communication plan.