ClubTalk

ClubTalk is hitting the road again with a fresh new program for 2016. The focus this year is "governance" which means less time doing the boring admin stuff and more time doing the fun sporty stuff.

The way to make this happen is TidyHQ, a tool that centralizes all your club's administrative needs. Coming this week to Bunbury, Nannup and Manjimup. Contact DSR to find out when the next ClubTalk workshop hits your town. Hope to see you there - Nik.

https://tidyhq.com/

TidyHQ - Administer your club or organization Group administration has never been easier, committee meetings, treasurers spreadsheets, events can all be simple with TidyClub. The platform for everyone.

This cricket season we recommend club’s use Team App's availabilities feature. It will make your coach’s life a lot simpler! Players can enter their availability directly via the app.

Players simply need to select whether they are or aren't available via the YES/NO toggle, then choose the date they are away or unavailable followed by some details about why.

Full administrators and restricted administrators will receive a push notification when a player has entered their availability into the app.

Club App

We have made it even easier for all our members to keep up to date on all things Geelong Hockey Club. Download Team App and search for Geelong Jaguars

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If you don't measure it, you can't improve it. That's true in marketing as in anything else. Our last ClubTalk group in Bunbury showed keen interest when Sandi brought up the subject of URL shortening. Shortened URL's can be created through a http://bitly.com account. It gives you the ability to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaignes.

Say you have a landing page on your website or linked to the club's page. The address might finish with a long list of meaningless letters and numbers. Bitly can convert it to something more user friendly.

Let's pretend you pasted this into an email newsletter or push notification using TeamApp. If you sent out 100 messages and 40 people clicked on the link, you could say that the email was 40% successful. Internet marketers call this the Click-Through Rate.

Of those 40 people, if only 4 people signup/register/buy something or do what ever it is you want them to do, the Conversion Rate is 10%. Armed with this knowledge you can compare this effort with previous campaignes. Figure out what you did right in the successful ones and do more of it. Look at which step in the process you are losing most people and fix this first. This is optimisation. Eventually you will fine tune it into an efficient marketing machine.

Bitly.com gives you these stats. And it's free!

Bitly - The Power of the Link Bitly Brand Tools: Own, understand and activate your best audience through the power of the link.

Northcliffe treated us with a nice surprise two nights ago. The local CRC was first class. A beautiful rammed earth venue in idylic bushland setting. Plus, the latest computer mod cons meant every ClubTalk participant got a chance to play with Team App and Facebook.

Frustratingly, Team App has made many development changes lately. Sandy is constantly playing catch up, keeping her slides up to date for each new session. A cool new addition is the option to add extra pages to the auto-generated Team App website. This can be really useful for the techno-phobes in your club who refuse to get a smart phone.

Be sure to check out this amazing new feature. Log in to your Team App, click on Settings then scroll down to the Website section. Use it to promote your sponsors, add an 'About Us' or reporting your club ladder. You could also add links to a Comfy Page website or club page.

A cool app to let loved ones know you are safe if you're ever caught in a disaster. Check it out - Johan.

Introducing Safety Check | Facebook Newsroom Giving people the power to share when it matters most.

Here's a another way to publicize a Social Media Policy on a club's Fanpage. It's better than the previous one in that it stays anchored to the page for longer. This method uses one of Facebook's in-built apps to add functionality to the page. It's called the "Notes" app.

Go to the links above the banner and click on "Settings". Then click "Apps" on the left. At the bottom click the "Add App" button next to Notes. With the app activated go back and view your page. The idea is to create a note that contains your SMP text. You should see a 'Notes' link under the banner. If not, it will be hidden under the 'More' link. Click it and then the "Write Note" button. Give it the title "Social Media Policy".

The advantage of notes is that they appear in their own little box down the left hand side on the main page. Notes are better than timeline posts for information that requires permanancy. But if you create many notes, eventually they too will push the older ones down. Still, if you only ever use this app for the Policy, no problem!

Clicking on a note allows everyone to read it and every note has a unique URL. A good idea might be to announce it in an email and send everybody the link. New notes appear on the timeline so everyone who has "liked" your page will also see it.

Johan and I had a fun time sharing at Spearwood again last night. Great to do social media again with some hot debate around the subject of . It really hammered home the point that clubs need a strategy in place before hand. Has cyber bullying ever happened to you or someone you know? How did you deal with it? - Nik.

So you created a Social Media Policy (SMP) and are ready to display it on your club's fanpage. How to do it? One way is to write it up in a status update just like you're reading now. It's instantaneous and requires no more skill than what you're doing on Facebook already. It also has the benefit of announcing your SMP to the world. Your current fans will see it pop up in their news feeds.

It's not the best long term solution however. The next time you post some news, the SMP will be pushed down and eventually end up out of sight. You can get around this by "pinning" the update to the top of the page. Hover the mouse over the top right corner of the update. A magic down arrow appears. If you click on it you'll be greeted with an option to "Pin to Top". Click on that and you're done.

Any new posts will now appear beneath the SMP. The effect lasts for a week. After that time the post will drop down to it's normal place in the timeline. Repinning it every week will quickly grow tiresome so next time I'll share a better way. But at least we've bought ourselves a week or two with little effort.

Waiting at Carnarvon airport for a delayed flight and I'm reflecting back on our Gascoyne experience. Both and workshops were great fun to deliver with very keen groups.

Sandi has hit her stride now with and I'd wager our training is now the best of it's kind in WA in how to use this fantastic app. Carnarvon in particular went seemlessly with lots of laughter as participants registered in each others' clubs and then toyed with the notifications feature. It's the instant response of pushing messages out to members that makes this so great for clubs.

For the first time too we had lots of people bringing their own tablets. Ordinarilly this would be fine but in delivering the Facebook segment turned out a headache. Tablets are way too simplistic for the demands of administering apps to a Fanpage. All the work needs to be done through a browser and not through the Facebook App. So if you read this and we're yet to come to you try to bring a laptop. - Nik

Our Mid-West adventure is about to kick off with workshop in just a few hours away. Things have started off well so far. Getting off the plane Johan and I were greated by glorious sunshine. A wonderful change following the weeks of drizzle in Perth. - Nik :)