LeagueApps Makes it Easier to Schedule Divisions!

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Many of our league partners like to setup their divisions as separate programs on LeagueApps. We just made it possible to schedule games between two teams who play in different divisions (i.e. cross-divisional scheduling). The LeagueApps squad made this feature update to give our partners the flexibility to allow teams in separate divisions to play one another. We realize one thing when it comes to scheduling – the more options, the better!

Any sports organization can now add cross-divisional games to their schedules on LeagueApps. This can be useful if you have several divisions in a season and want to give teams in different divisions the opportunity to play one another. It gives teams who wouldn’t normally cross paths the chance to mix it up with different opponents and meet new faces. You can even hype up your season finale by having the leaders of each division square off for a shot at the season title! Another use-case we’ve seen is with organizations who are scrambling to finish building out a schedule for their season. They now have the ability to schedule out-of-league games and easily fill up their schedules. Some organizations even match up teams in different skill level divisions for fun. For instance, a soccer team in the recreational division might face a team in the competitive division.

Read our help article for detailed instructions on how to handle cross-program scheduling. Once you schedule a cross-program game, you should see a green symbol on the schedule next to the game (see below).

We’re interested to hear how you like to schedule your divisions on LeagueApps. As always, send us feedback and let us know how this is helpful to you. Hit up Asaf if you’d like to chat – 646-660-9430, or awiner@sportsvite.com.

How To Publish your Registration to Facebook

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Last month, the LeagueApps squad released a powerful Facebook registration publishing feature. The feature allows players to share their sports activities with their Facebook friends. By pushing their registration links out to Facebook, your members can act as your sports organization’s salespeople and recruit new players for your leagues.

We made a brief video that illustrates how players can publish their registrations to Facebook each time they register for a program. The video walks through Facebook registration publishing and shows the viral impact it can have.

Facebook registration publishing can play an integral role in your organization’s growth. As players signup and publish their registration links to Facebook, their Facebook friends can follow the link and register for a program on your site. This leads to BETTER exposure, MORE registrations, and NEW members!!

Check that your Facebook Settings are configured so you can start leveraging Facebook registration publishing. Next up for Facebook, we’ll be creating Facebook Page Apps, allowing for even more integration between your LeagueApps site and Facebook fan page. Stay tuned for more details.

If you have any questions/feedback on Facebook or you need your Facebook App integrated, just ask Asaf! You can reach him at awiner@sportsvite.com or 646-660-9430.

LeagueApps Teams Up With Facebook

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Over the last few months the LeagueApps team released a host of new features that fully leverages and integrates Facebook. We’re going to break it all down in this post and share the marketing and social benefits for league partners that utilize these features. First, here is why LeagueApps decided to focus on building out our Facebook partnership.

• Most sports organizations are already creating and managing their own Facebook pages.
• Players (most everybody actually) are using Facebook every day
• There are unique marketing benefits to sharing an organization’s leagues, events and activities through Facebook
• Facebook is a social platform. People share updates, photos, videos and content. A main theme of LeagueApps is to help players prolong the positive feeling of playing sports on AND off the field.

Facebook Login & Member Accounts

The Facebook Registration plugin for LeagueApps allows league members to signup and login to their account using their Facebook credentials. Having members utilize their Facebook identity allows them to be more social with their teammates.

Account Convenience
New or returning members can signup, login and register using their Facebook account. This simplifies the registration process for all new members leading to more successful completed registrations.

Social Profiles
League members can initiate social connections that can go beyond the playing fields. Members profile photos are populated with their Facebook photo and links to their profile. Players can view and “friend” their teammates’ through Facebook.

Member Retention
More social interaction between players leads to more camaraderie and better member retention. Facebook connection is another way to get players excited about where a sports organization is heading and ensure they’ll continue to participate in leagues activities.

Facebook Feed Publishing – Program Registration

Players can publish their league program registrations to their Facebook profile feed. This viral feature allows players to easily share their sports activities with their friends. Members can now easily recruit new players for your leagues by sharing registration links through Facebook!

Facebook Page – Website Integration

Facebook Pages allow for unlimited “fans” and get great search engine visibility. They help an organization build a social mailing list that can be reached at any time. This LeagueApps feature allows a league to connect its Facebook page to its LeagueApps website. This facilitates members to “like” the Facebook page and join your league community on Facebook. Members are encouraged to “like” the league Facebook page after they register or join a league program.

Here is a short video tutorial that shows how a Facebook page is linked to a LeagueApps Account.

LeagueApps Wall

League organizers can use the LeagueApps Wall features to post announcements to members through the site. The wall gives a league the ability for admins to communicate with members quickly and effectively. These messages can automatically be pushed to a league’s Facebook page. Players that post to the wall can also share their messages through Facebook.

We’re thrilled to share all of these features with you and eager to hear your feedback and learn the benefit they bring for your organization. Be sure to check our our LeagueApps help articles to get more detailed instruction on how to use these new features within the admin console. There’s actually much more we plan to do with Facebook in the future. We’re just getting warming up!

LeagueApps Adds a New Role – the Captain Scorekeeper!

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LeagueApps just helped you expand the role of team captains in your organization. Our new team captain scorekeeper feature lets you delegate scoring responsibilities to your team captains. We built this feature to help our league partners be more efficient in league management and to more quickly update game results and standings. By giving captains scorekeeping duties, league owners have one less thing to worry about in their day-to-day operations. Additionally, if you have hired score reporters, you can now cut down on resources by letting your captains make the updates.

Simply turn on the setting in your admin console (“Settings > Scoring and Standings > Edit Scorekeeper Settings”) and captains will be able to enter game scores right on their team schedule. Captains can enter scores for any of their games that are at least 1 hour past the scheduled start of the game. Team captains can also dispute the scores an opposing captain has entered. Ultimately, the league admin has the final say in settling the dispute.

 
We’re interested to hear how the captain scorekeeper feature affects your league. Feel free to shoot any feedback over to Asaf at 646-660-9430 or at awiner@sportsvite.com.

LeagueApps New Website Design Tools

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We all want to have a website that looks good. In many of our conversations, sports organizers have expressed a desire to use LeagueApps to create a professional and super-fly custom website design that is representative of the league’s brand and theme. In fact, we recently published a post on different ways to pimp out your LeagueApps homepage design.

LINspired by the possibilities, the LeagueApps team decided to take our design tools to the next level. These new features will enable any account admin to develop a custom, professional website design within minutes!

Homepage Themes

A website homepage is often the first experience a potential customer or member has with your organization. So it should be amazing. LeagueApps has added three different homepage templates styles that can be integrated with a click of a button. The multi-column template layouts include modules for photos, registration buttons, and social media icons. Below are examples of the three different layouts.
 

 

 

Theme Editor – Color Schemes

With over a dozen different color options within the theme editor, it’s conceivable your site will clash worse than the 2011 Boston Red Sox clubhouse. To ensure it stays sharp, we’ve added a bunch of different base color schemes with ridiculous names from Blue Steel to Lemon Lime. Even once a color scheme is selected, it can still be tweaked with the custom color fields. Share your ideas on additional color schemes with us and we might just add it to our default list.

Theme Editor – Images

The “images” tab of the theme editor is now easier to use to add header images, logos or page backgrounds. Quickly and easily upload your league images and they will be properly formatted within your website.

Them Editor – Page Backgrounds

An image background is one of the best ways to bring your website to life. Many of our current partners use sports-themed backgrounds on their current website. We’ve added a help document with optimized background images that will look slick as backgrounds for LeagueApps websites. Check them out here and follow the easy instructions to add them to your website.

Custom Designers

If you have budget and are looking to hire a designer to invest in an even more customized design, we can help match you with independent web designers who are familiar with the LeagueApps platform and that we have worked with in the past. Let us know if this is an option you would like to explore.

These design tools should take your website to the next level. Now everyone will see that your league is hot on the inside (back-end admin tools) AND the outside (front-end website design)! And that’s what really matters!

Promote your Programs with Twitter!

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Last month, the LeagueApps team officially began its social integration by launching our first Facebook project.  Our goal with ‘social’ is to help our league partners ramp up promotion of their club activities, while getting members more engaged and better connected. Driving home the theme of promotion and engagement, we have now given league organizers the ability to include a Tweet button on any program page on your LeagueApps site. This latest feature allows organizers to leverage Twitter as another tool for promoting activities.  Much like the Facebook buttons we have added to LeagueApps,  these Tweet buttons give the members themselves the means to promote directly from the site.

If you don’t have a Twitter account setup, you can create a Twitter account here.

To include a Tweet button in your program page, go to the “Manage” tab in your LeagueApps Manager console.  Then follow the steps listed in our Twitter Help article.

Once a Tweet button is added to a program page, any site visitor (member or non-member) can see the button, click it, and share the page link with his/her Twitter followers.  Tweets are sent directly from the program page, saving tweeters the hassle of having to log-in to Twitter and tweet from their accounts.

Tweet buttons are a great way for members and site visitors to promote programs via Twitter and to ultimately help boost the amount of registrations to a program.  As a league organizer, this is yet another way to benefit from your member base’s social reach.  The more Tweets get shared and the more Twitter followers your members have, the better chance you have of recruiting new signups!

Below is an example of where to find the Tweet button on a LeagueApps program page:

Stay tuned for many more social features in 2012, including more Twitter integration, Facebook Apps, and much more.  Let us know what questions you have.  We also love to hear your feedback when using these new features, so feel free to hit us up!  Contact our Account Manager Asaf, at 646-660-9430 or at awiner@sportsvite.com.

Configure Your Facebook Settings in Less than 3 Min!

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Earlier this month, the LeagueApps team released its first Facebook integration update. The release is an important one because it introduces our Facebook promotional tools and lays the groundwork for more cool features to be added in the future.

You can start utilizing these tools by connecting your Facebook Page to your LeagueApps account.  We made a short video that walks through configuring your Facebook Settings and illustrates the promotional benefits of doing so.

Linking up your Facebook Settings on your account will allow you to incorporate various Facebook ‘Like’ buttons across your site.  This is a great way to promote your Facebook page to your members and site visitors.  Additionally, your members will be promoting your organization through their Facebook newsfeed every time they ‘Like’ your page.  This makes our tools a simple yet effective way to cross-promote between your Facebook page and your LeagueApps site.

So hook up your Facebook Settings if you haven’t already done so- it takes less than 3 minutes!  Up next, we’ll be integrating Facebook Connect into the LeagueApps platform – allowing your members to log-in using their Facebook credentials, and more. Look out for release notes soon.

If you have any questions or feedback on our Facebook integration, please reach out to Asaf at awiner@sportsvite.com, or 646-660-9430.

5 Ways to Pimp Your LeagueApps Homepage

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The LeagueApps team are firm believers in the “Look good feel good play good” mantra. We think the statement translates to website homepages too. Your homepage is the first thing people see, so it is important to leave a lasting impression. Besides being a good place to show off your league to new potential members, your homepage can be a source of information for current members to easily access. Additionally, having good homepage content is essential for SEO strategy.

The LeagueApps Theme and content editors make it easy to design your homepage the way you like it. To add content to your homepage, go to the “Content” tab in your console, then click on “Pages > Homepage”  (more on Creating Content Pages here).

Here are 5 things you can add to your homepage to jazz it up:

1) Share Registration and Schedule Information

Your homepage is a great place to share league information with your players. Just grab a widget from your LeagueApps console. The Registration Listings widget is a good one to add to your homepage because it allows your members to start the registration process with just one click.

Click here for tips on integrating your widgets.

Rockville Athletics Sports League has a widget that gives players easy access to all of the Schedules and Standings.

2. Information Center

Use your homepage as a hub for your organization’s news and announcements. Leagues often post game highlights on their homepage, as well as cancellations and postponements.

Q-Sports Leagues recaps their season and pays tribute to the league champions.

3. Personalize your Theme

Use the LeagueApps Theme Editor to control your colors, fonts, and homepage images. You can really set the tone by establishing a consistent theme that characterizes your league or organization.

All City Athletics has a city landscape header and a hardwood floor background image that truly reflects what they are all about.

4) Countdown

Add a countdown widget to inform your players when the next season or highly-anticipated event starts.

Philadelphia Sports Network has a Countdown Widget that counts down the time till their Winter Registration begins.

5) Social Plug-ins

Adding social plug-ins to your homepage is an easy way to grow your social networking fan base and keep your members engaged.

Denver Pirate Leagues has a Facebook Activity Feed and a Twitter profile plugin on their homepage.

These are just a few examples of ways you can liven up your homepage.  Reach out if you would like help creating a cool homepage through LeagueApps.

LeagueApps Practice Drills

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Coaches always stress the importance of preparation and as many of you leagues out there know, “Practice Makes Perfect.”  Well we here at LeagueApps have taken that concept and made even more improvements to the LeagueApps experience.  For those of you unfamiliar with our platform, you will now find two separate practice drills when logging into the LeagueApps console.  The immediate benefit of going thru these drills is that you can explore all of the major features we have to offer in just a few short clicks.

We also want to introduce you to our lovely new team member, “LeagueApps Lindsay” who will coach you through the drills.

• Explore a Sample Program – This drill lets you walk through a live program. You’ll get to see all the behind the scene actions for creating a program.

• Get to know LeagueApps – The second drill gives you a highlight reel of the LeagueApps platform and all the features we have to offer.

Clicking through a drill will give you a good feel for LeagueApps and how flexible it is to meet all your league management needs. If you have any suggestions for future practice drills you would like to see, do let us know.

In addition to these practice drills, we offer FREE live demos of our platform at your convenience.  For any questions, comments, or feedback please feel free to contact our LeagueApps marketing manager Michael@sportsvite.com or at 646-660-9410.

How to Allow Teammate Requests on LeagueApps

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Part of the fun of joining a league is playing alongside your friends. Every rec sports superstar wants to form that Jordan/Pippen-esque 1-2 punch combo with his or her buddy.

You can easily handle teammate requests on LeagueApps with our Registration Form Fields. The best way to do so is by adding a custom form field for “Teammate Requests”. This field lets a registered player provide the contact information of any other player(s), thus giving your members the chance to signup for a team with one or more people of their choosing. The system collects this information during registration, and all you then have to do is make sure each requested pair or group of players is placed on the same team.

Click here for instructions on how to move players in a league.

Read our Help Doc for an in-depth look at how to customize registration forms.

We are thinking about ways to add a “groups” feature in the future. If you have feedback or suggestions on how that can work, please reach out.