Articles
Get organized, get time, get paid.
Getting ready for the upcoming school year can get stressful. But this year, don’t put in even more hours prepping for Fall when you could be getting organized, getting paid, and spending more time poolside.
Take these 2 simple steps to simplify and organize both yours and parents’ lives this Summer, and clear up your to-do list this Fall.
- Digital Forms. Stacks of paper are the worst. Get out of the paper business by digitizing your forms.Upload all department forms directly from your computer to your website, so they’re always accessible. Having all necessary information available and in one place will allow your athletes to turn-in their forms sooner, rather than later. Come August, all your forms will be organized, and you’ll actually be able to see your desk again.
- Online registration allows you to register athletes and accept payments, completely through your website. The easy-to-incorporate technology will save you time by having all registration information in one place, and less phone calls into your office at school’s start.Any payment that accompanies registry will automatically go into your department’s account — so you get paid, without lifting a finger.Bonus: You’ll have super-appreciative parents who will love how easy registration is from home.Learn more about online registration.
Get more time for yourself and parents this Summer, money for your department and a far smoother transition into the 2013-2014 school year.
Want to learn more? New to VNN? Contact us!
Exceed Expectations this Summer
You’ve almost made it — Summer is right around the corner. Spring sports are wrapping up, exams are in session, and graduation preparation is in full swing.
Soon you’ll face the AD’s biggest seasonal challenge: Keeping in touch with your community once school is out. And if you lose touch over break, it makes your job that much more hectic come Fall.
So take these easy steps to ensure your department exceeds expectations within your community this Summer, to make for a smooth transition into Fall and a killer 2013-2014 sports year.
Stay on the radar. The biggest reason AD’s lose touch with their community during the summer is they’re not actively trying to reach them. Start the Summer off right — send an e-mail during the first week off letting parents and athletes know that you’ll be available this summer and when you can be reached. Relaying this information will get everyone on the same page right away. That means less time responding to voicemails and e-mails, and more time enjoying the break.
Host a Summer Mixer. Hosting a department mixer is an awesome way to gather your community and athletes together outside of school. Making the mixer a “Kick-Off” event for the athletic year will get your fans hyped about the approaching seasons and your athletes excited about playing them.
Bonus: Tell your attendees they can find pictures from the event on your site, by handing out cards with your URL on them. (Click here for a template!)
Post it. Your community cares about your programs. Post to your website and social media pages with news, important forms or documents, and upcoming events. Keeping your sites up to date will train your fans to go to your website for all athletic information, and not to call you for every question they have. Increased traffic to your site also means increased coverage for your sports programs, which your athletes (and gate receipts) will love.
Taking these simple steps this Summer will result in less calls to your office, more page views on your website and larger audiences at your sporting events. An engaged community within your athletic department will supercharge your programs to make next year your best year ever.
Have questions on how to engage your community this summer? Contact us, we’d love to help.
Avoid a complacent Athletic Department
With the 1,243 items on your to-do list, raising awareness for your department may be the last thing on your mind. But putting this off could yield a less effective athletic department.
Don’t let this happen.
Here’s 5 things you can do to raise awareness for your sports programs.
Hang a banner (If you’re not already doing this, don’t wait) Purchasing a banner to hang in your athletic fields or stadiums is an easy and inexpensive way to let people know about your athletic website. Just include a short message for your community telling where they can find the latest news for your athletic department, like the one shown below!
Post Photos “A picture’s worth a thousand words” couldn’t be more true when it comes to your athletic contests. Photos from events are most likely to drive people to your athletic site, and keep them coming back.
And good news. Parents love to take pictures. Making an effort to post galleries from athletic events will train your community to go to your site first to find awesome pictures of their favorite athletes.
Take advantage of Social Media I know it’s a pain, but if you want to reach ALL of your community, at this point you have to use Facebook and Twitter to do so.
Relay department news or alerts by posting on your athletic sites’ social media pages, and reach your fans faster than ever. (Even better, posting on VNN sites automatically updates your Facebook and Twitter pages.)
Create a video Creating cool videos to showcase your athletic department is an awesome way to raise awareness while displaying your students’ tech skills. Talk with your media department about having students create a video specifically for your department — you’ll be impressed with the outcome! Check out this video created by students at West Bloomfield high school.
http://youtu.be/Wb5teoWyaas
10 minute rule Setting aside ten or fifteen minutes every week to devote to your online presence – whether your website, Facebook or Twitter – will generate serious results in increasing awareness. Your community will love the updates from your department, and your department will love all the new attention it’s getting.
Want to supercharge your athletic department? We’d love to help. Give us a shout.
Top 3 Time Intensive Mistakes AD's Make
As Athletic Director, nothing hurts more than wasting time on pointless tasks. Make sure you’re not making one of the most common time-wasting mistakes listed below. Are you committing one of the Top 3 Time Intensive Mistakes that Athletic Directors make?MISTAKE #1: Not having important information on your website
VNN's Favorite 12 School Moments of 2012
What better way to ring in the new year than recapping some impressive moments from 2012. VNN network schools killed it this year…and we’re pumped to be a part of it. Here are our 12 favorite moments of 2012.
New to VNN? Click here to get your school signed up!
How to sell out your annual auction, and gain 1,000 Facebook fans, in 1 week
Your Problem. Your school’s annual auction is Saturday, but morning announcements just aren’t cutting it for bringing people through the door.
Your Solution… Facebook.
Create a contest that not only brings people to your auction, but also builds your fanbase for the long term. Just follow these 5 simple steps:
- Create a Facebook page for your school if you haven’t already.
- Create a public event for the fundraiser, and post it on your school’s page. Describe some key items that will get people excited. Can your guests win something? Will a compelling guest speaker be present?
- Post a picture on your Facebook page representing each class within your school. That’s 1 picture for Freshmen, 1 for Sophomores, one for Juniors and one for Seniors. Class pictures work well here, or any image that represents the class.
- Spread the word through morning announcements that the picture with the most ‘Likes’ by a certain date will receive a pizza party! This is the contest part, and the secret sauce.
- Sit back and watch. What you should see is your entire school campaigning for their class to win the pizza party, by sending people to ‘Like’ their class’s picture. The key is that they have to ‘Like’ your Facebook page in the process!
Follow these 5 simple steps to fill up your school’s annual auction, and get tons of Facebook fans in a short amount of time (we got 1,000 fans in a week). These fans are your captive audience for your next announcement, or next fundraiser!
Social media is all about community. Your community is already engaged in your athletic programs on social media, and you should be too. You’ll reach more people than you ever would have with morning announcements and flyers.
Bringing VNN to Indiana
VNN Indiana Sales Manager
A Little About Chris
Where did you go to high school?
Wawasee HS in Syracuse Indiana
Did you play any sports?
I was a 4 year letter winner in Tennis, and had the good fortune to play collegiately at Indiana Purdue- Fort Wayne.
Why did you join the VNN team?
I love the product. VNN’s platform makes it really simple for high school athletic departments to do the kind of sports information we did at the college level, by integrating all the major communication channels onto one website. I am excited to help schools use VNN to proactively showcase their programs, and leverage the power of athletics to rally community support. Also, I’m looking forward to helping schools increase sponsorship dollars without asking them to sell anything.
What’s your favorite professional sports team & why?
The Indianapolis Colts of course! Being in a smaller market, the Colts have to do everything just a little bit better to be competitive with the mid and major markets. I love that spirit, and I’d say it’s pretty fair to say the Colts have done many things right.
How can Indiana ADs reach you?
If you already know you need a website for your athletic department, but don’t have time to manage it, give me a call directly at 1-888-458-7534 and we’ll get you set up!
We look forward to working with you, Indiana! Click here to send Chris an email and he’ll get you started.
What do all Athletic Directors have in common? An overflowing email inbox.
You get emails…lots of them. We do, too!
Email is definitely a great way to communicate with parents, students, friends and family. You can read it on your own time and respond when you have a few free minutes. However, the sheer volume of emails we know Athletic Directors get might border on overwhelming and even…insane at times.
We found a way to bring you back to sanity. It’s called, Sanebox!
The team at VNN has been using Sanebox for the last few months and we thought it was too good not to share with you. It is an automatic filter that sorts through your emails as they come in, and places non-urgent messages in your ‘SaneLater’ folder that you can check, well…later! While you use it, you ‘train’ it how to teach all of your contacts – and it’s super easy.
Sanebox costs about $5 per month. They also offer a free trial so you can try it before you buy it. Click here for more information.
Check out this video to learn a little more:
We love to share helpful tools we find around the worldwide web – so check in every now and then for more apps we think you’ll like!
– The Team @ VNN
Turn Twitter #Hashtags into Dollar $igns
Twitter is the sponsorship model of the future today.
First of all, a Twitter hashtag is the # sign followed by a word or phrase. People on Twitter use these at the end of their tweets as a subject classifier.
Example: “Happy 4th of July! Looking forward to some BBQ and fireworks today #USA”
If enough people are using the same hashtag, it starts trending and more people get in on the conversation. On the 4th of July, #USA was a trending topic.
Why does this matter?
Potential revenue.
Imagine a hashtag for a high school sports game and fans started tweeting about the live action together. Businesses could get involved with deals like, “Fans of the team with the most tweets receive free French fries after the game.”
Think of the sponsorship revenue potential. Let’s say for $200 ($100 for your school, $100 for the opposing school) a business can sponsor a game with a specific deal. That’s $200/game, just for leveraging Twitter.
Announce the plan leading up to the event, distribute flyers at the game with the #GoTeam hashtag and, wah-lah, new revenue for your school and new business for the sponsor.
It’s a #WinWin.
3-step guide to Search Engine Optimization for busy Athletic Directors
The 3-step Guide to SEO for Busy Athletic Directors
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making specific tweaks to the words and structure of your website in order to help it rank higher in Google search results. It’s a long and complex process, but it’s critical to getting your site found online.
Luckily, VNN has put together a handy dandy cheatsheet of some things you can do right now to make a big improvement to your SEO.
1. Titles:
Use your school name and the name of the sport in the title of your article.
Example: “Forest Hills Northern football takes down Grand Rapids Christian” is a great, search-engine-friendly title to an article. Search engines don’t know that you’re writing directly for your school, so you need to write your titles like you’re writing for a worldwide audience if you want Google to find your story. (Exception: Don’t force it where it doesn’t fit. If you write like a robot you risk losing your human audience.)
2. Tags:
Use tags religiously, but keep them short.
Example: “Volleyball” is a good tag. “East Kentwood Volleyball” is a bad tag. Names are also great tags, so “Betsy Smith” works too. Search engines look to the tags to properly index your article, so be sure that you’re using them (hint: they’re on the right side of the screen when you write an article).
3. Links:
Link your district website to your VNN site.
Example: When you click “Athletics” on your district website, it should go directly to your VNN website via what’s called a “301 Redirect” (ask your tech department). Search engines transfer clout from one website to the next via links, so having multiple sites link to one another helps raise the search engine love for all sites.
Follow the three steps above, and watch as the traffic to your site increases.
About the Simple Sports Marketing series
Varsity News Network helps clients successfully market their athletic departments online. There is a ton you can do, but there are only 24 hours in a day. The Simple Sports Marketing series makes it easy to prioritize what you do with the time you do have, to help you get the most bang for your buck.
If you’re not proactively marketing your athletic program through VNN, what are you waiting for? Learn more
VNN Is One-Stop Hub For Saline HS Athletics (Saving A.D. Time)
Averaging over 30,000 pageviews per month in 2011, SalineHornets.com sets the gold standard
When Saline High School (SHS) Athletic Director Rob White has important information to give to his community, he wants the exchange to be quick and easy. To White, a website filled with twists and turns that confuse parents and fans is simply unacceptable.
His original idea was bold. White wanted Saline’s athletic website to rival that of the University of Michigan’s. To get there, White reached out to Varsity News Network (VNN) to supercharge Salinehornets.com.
VNN, a Grand Rapids based-company founded in 2010, offers high schools an online athletic system that not only makes things like schedules and directions easily accessible, but also incorporates sports journalism, setting a foundation for students to report on their school’s athletic programs. VNN is like ESPN.com for high schools.
This added journalistic perspective was especially important to White, due to the diminishing coverage Saline’s non-football sports had received.
Increasing coverage for student athletes
Saline, a town with a population around 9,000 people, is twenty miles away from Ann Arbor. Saline High School used to rely on Annarbor.com as the only source of sports coverage. This worked until Annarbor.com began cutting back on their staff, and in turn, cutting back on their high school sports coverage.
White grew tired of seeing his athletes’ stories fall through the cracks.
“Our JV soccer team had played 12 games without giving up a single goal, and nobody knew about it,” White said. “AnnArbor.com didn’t give them recognition, so we needed to do this ourselves.”
With a goal of covering all sports, paired with the VNN software system, all White had to do was find his sports journalists.
Sports journalism independent study
Saline no longer had a high school newspaper due to low enrollment, so White collaborated with the English department to develop an independent study class in sports journalism. It took off immediately.
Four student athletes jumped on the opportunity to cover sports for credit, and have since been responsible for covering all sports at Saline. After dividing up the events according to a calendar, each student’s class involves covering 2-3 games per week. They post articles, photos, and videos to SalineHornets.com and are graded (pass/fail) on a weekly basis.
White runs the sports journalism class seamlessly through VNN. The result has been constant media coverage of all 32 sports teams and the 1300 athletes they represent. More coverage than any other school in the area.
Saving time with proactive communication
VNN has also made it easier for coaches and parents to find the information they need. All of Saline’s athletic forms are well organized on SalineHornets.com, as are the schedules, rosters, and the latest scores for every Saline team. Visitors can keep up to date with the latest Saline news on Facebook and Twitter, or stay connected with a daily email newsletter, outreach which happens automatically through VNN. Articles from the local paper automatically fed into the website, making SalineHornets.com the one stop hub for information about Saline sports.
White has found that proactive communication means far less phone calls from people asking the same old questions. Where is the game? How much money do tickets cost? What was the score of last night’s game? These phone calls have all but disappeared, leaving White more time to spend with student athletes.
I just think about what I would want to see if I were a parent or fan, and I make sure it’s on our site,” White explains. “With VNN, we have the best website around.”
Maranda Goes Behind The Scenes With A VNN School
See what goes on behind the scenes at Forest Hills Central when Maranda visits the Rangers’ journalism class. She also talks to VNN Co-Founder Ryan Vaughn about the benefits of becoming part of the ‘Network’ and the positive exposure that it gives to all sports.