All posts by Melissa

Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners

Tournaments,

Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners is a quick, easy way to build value for your advertisers and sponsors. While your TourneyCentral Advertiser Module and Google Analytics will give you aggregate traffic, you may want to track individual ads or links more closely. This is where URL shorteners really shine.

Let’s take a look at how to do it using the popular shortening service, bitly.com.

  1. Sign up for an account at bitly.com. I like using the @tourneycentral twitter account because I hate setting up one more user name/password account. Obviously, to log in with twitter, you need to have a twitter account. Use your soccer tournament account, not your personal handle so that your link history is part of the tournament record.
  2. Edit your profile, including an email address. Verify the address.Open your TourneyCentral Admin and navigate to the Advertising Module. Click to the first DEALS listing and copy the web address.
  3. Create your first shortened link by clicking on the orange button at the top.
    Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners
  4. Paste the actual advertiser link in the Long URL box and Create. Copy the shortener URL into the Advertiser record in your TourneyCentral Admin and update.
    Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners
  5. Over at bitly.com, eit your shortened link to include a DEALS tag and title to make building reports easier.
    Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners
  6. Repeat for as many links as you want to track

Now, when advertisers or sponsors want to know how their DEALS placement did or when you need to go back for a renewal ad for next year, you’ll have data.

URL shorteners are also useful when advertisers or housing services give you URLs that are long, unwieldy or complicated with non-alphanumerics. When you run them through a URL shortener, it cleans them up smartly.

Managing soccer tournament DEALS with URL shorteners; it’s a tool that every Advertising Director should have in their tournament toolbox.

Hope Foundation for Greater Dayton

Partnering with a nonprofit at your soccer tournament

Tournaments, ,

Partnering with a non-profit organization is a great way to connect with your community. However it can get challenging.

When working with a non-profit, know what will truly help their cause. Listen carefully, as most will not assert themselves aggressively. For example, collecting canned goods for a food pantry might seem to be helpful, but finding transportation and distribution for the goods could become more of a hassle (and more costly!) than a cash donation to the organization. Most non-profit organizations could use donations more efficiently than the tangible items that are donated at the fields.

While it is up to you to determine how best to partner with a non-profit, once you have crafted a relationship, TourneyCentral has a lot of tools to help you push your message out. (An example of these features can be seen on the MASC tournament site. They partnered with the Butler County Special Olympics for their 2014 event. Check out what the MASC is doing!)

Our advice:
1. Use DEALS. You can add to five non-profit, community-based organizations like Special Olympics, parks dept, museums, etc., that do not involve ad placement or in-kind donations free of charge. They would appear under the DEALS and in the sponsors just as your paid placement woudld. You can rank them so that they always appear at the top of the list.

This includes as much content as they want to provide, including a deal, link to their donation page, a flyer (downloadable pdf), a video, twitter, and facebook.

2. Include news stories on the front page. Our latest software update allows you to make one story sticky, i.e., always appear at the top. The news story can include photos and a video as well.

3. Use the broadcast tool to send out a special email to the teams that only include the charity..this can be a rich HTML email (we can help with that…)

4. Use your twitter, facebook, vine, Instagram and Google Plus accounts. Promote, promote, promote. Be generous.(Start here if you are new to social media.)

Regardless of how your program shapes up, do something cool enough for us to write about (like the MASC) and keep us in the loop. We love bragging about our TourneyCentral soccer tournament events.

Advice on this article offered by Scott Sliver. Scott Sliver (Sly-ver) is Executive Director of The Hope Foundation of Greater Dayton. On twitter, he is @hope4dayton or @scottsliver and by email scott@hope4dayton.com.

Doing twitter right at your soccer tournament

Tournaments

Many parents and players are using social media channels these days so why not make it easy for them to keep up with your tournament in real-time? It’s a quick and easy way to let teams and parents know standings, scores, photos, and possible schedule changes. Twitter is a great tool to keep everyone involved in your tournament all weekend long, even after the final games have been played.

The Thunder United Classic used twitter effectively this weekend, specifically doing these four things:

1. Tweeting photos in real time
Opening up the event, the Thunder United Classic hosted a skydiver carrying the American flag onto the fields. They tweeted a few pictures of his landing. Sunday before the finals, they tweeted out pictures of the trophies.

2. Tweeting score updates as they occur
As new scores arrived, Thunder United Classic wasted no time in tweeting that they were available. They also gave the bracket information in the tweet so the teams knew exactly which ones were available.

3. Tweeting sponsor and advertising deals
Thunder United Classic made sure that teams and parents knew about their sponsors by tweeting which ones were at the venue.

4. Retweeting sponsor tweets
They showed support for their sponsors by retweeting and expanding their network reach to the desired audience.

Becoming real-time allows teams to tweet about how great the tournament went and they can even give your sponsors a shout-out. Encourage sponsors to also get in on the action by tweeting about specials and congratulating winning teams. By encouraging sponsors to use Twitter, it can boost the sponsors’ interaction with the teams and make your tournament even more personal and sponsors will be ecstatic to return the following year.