Pre-season checklist - community engagement
A new season is knocking on your door and it’s time to get everything ready to hit the ground running.
This week we will dive into some things you should get through early on so that you can focus on your athletes and their work.
Today we will talk about everything you can do to get a head start when it comes to reaching out to your community. We will look into community engagement as well as recruitment of volunteers.
Community strategies
Your community is the breeding ground for all your activities. Your club can add a sense of pride and camaraderie into your athletes, their parents and the general public.
It’s imperative to let them know that a new season is about to start and that you have everything ready to come out on top.
Communication channels
In todays age, social media dominates the circulation of information - for good or bad.
Short form videos are easy to produce and can get you a lot of traction on different platforms. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube are all excellent platforms to communicate with your audience.
The great thing about short for videos is that you can create them once and post them to all the different platforms. That way your audience might see them multiple times and share them with their friends and followers and amplifying your reach.
You can post different types of content for different social media platforms. Younger audience can usually be targeted on TikTok or Instagram while at the same time their parents can get content tailored to them on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
The key thing here is that you don’t need to have a professional setup or amazing editing. The platforms themselves enable you to do simple editing and captioning and all you need to have is a phone and internet connection.
Simply turn our some of those apps and share your vision, goals and stories with the world.
It will help your club look more open and welcoming and new members won’t see you as a stranger since they have already seen you somewhere.
Show off parts of your training, interviews with your athletes, share some victories and lessons learned from previous seasons. Show the human side of your club and showcase how you are different from the rest.
Finding volunteers
We have talked about volunteer recruitment a few times (here, here, and here) but it can not be emphasised enough how important this can be for your club’s growth and success.
Blog post showing off work that has been done by your volunteers and highlight the appreciation you have for them and their work.
You can make these things as (in)formal as you want. Try to make the videos reflect you and your club as you really are, a group of people striving to achieve great things by training and enjoying time in other people’s company.
