Shirt Reporting Configuration and Best Practices

Best Practices, Feature Highlight, Value of LeagueApps

LeagueApps partners frequently express the important role of t-shirts within their sports organization. Many partners almost feel like they moonlight as t-shirt vendors since they spend so much time and energy on shirt ordering, distribution and customer service.

Shirts serve multiple purposes. Many sports programs will provide shirts to their teams and/or participants as uniforms for their sports activities. The shirts are often included as part of the registration fee. An added benefit for both the leagues and it’s members is that individuals will rock the shirt beyond the playing field. It’s great marketing (a human billboard!) as the participants are proud to show off their athletic and/or social super-stardom to their friends!

LeagueApps enjoys collecting our partner shirts and we plan to hang them up on the walls in our office. We’ll be sure to share photos once we actually hang them up.

Unfortunately, dealing with shirts can be exasperating for a league organizer. Shirt quantities, colors and sizes all have to be collected and managed properly. Shirt ordering is often time-sensitive. Shirts need to be printed and delivered by the start of the sports programs. If a players doesn’t get their correct shirt, watch out!

LeagueApps can help with the t-shirt process. Here are some of the best practices.

Collect T-Shirt Sizes (With Customized Form Fields)

Customized form fields can be utilized during the registration process to obtain the t-shirt size for each participant. The most practical way to do this is create a mandatory drop down form field with all of the different shirt sizes. As each of your members register for a new program they will enter their shirt size.

We recommend to add this form field to each program registration. You may also consider adding a form field to the member profile information when new accounts are created (although player shirt size may change over time). This way you will also have an additional listing of a players t-shirt size as a backup.

Generate a Shirt Report (Individual Program)

As the registration period ends it’s time to tally up all of the team and player information in order to create a t-shirt order. Within each program you can extract a spreadsheet (.csv) report of all of the player data. This will include additional form field information such as t-shirt size. You might even want to delete some of the fields that are unnecessary to create a shirt report. Often, it makes sense to sort by team and then by size and manually tally the totals for each program. Below is an example of how a spreadsheet might look.

Generate A Shirt Report (All Programs)

Shirt reporting and ordering gets way more complicated when multiple leagues or programs all need to be processed and ordered at the same time.

The new registration report within LeagueApps should be helpful. Instead of having to pull a report of each individual program you can now pull a report of multiple programs. Programs can be sorted by status, name, sport or type. For example, a report can be pulled of all upcoming basketball leagues. Reports can even be saved for future use.

Similar to the individual program report, a spreadsheet (.csv) can be generated that includes player name, program, team as well as form field information that would include t-shirt size. Actual t-shirt sizes by team still need to be calculated from within the spreadsheet so be sure to find an excel guru if you need help!

What’s Next

We know there are ways that LeagueApps can improve how it can help leagues with their t-shirt reporting to make it even quicker and easier. A few enhancements on the list include:

• Incorporate team colors into the reports
• Automatically tally t-shirts by size, team and program within LeagueApps and .csv files
• Enable the ability to send a report directly to your shirt vendor
• Collect additional fees for special shirts or sizes

Let us know how your organization uses LeagueApps to help with shirt reporting. Or hit us up if you think we can help configure LeagueApps to make this process more efficient.

LeagueApps New Automated Billing and Invoice System

Feature Highlight, Product News

LeagueApps took a page out of it’s own playbook as we recognized that a more advanced invoice and payment system is needed for our sports organization partners and customers.

LeagueApps is proud of our policy that our partners collect 100% of the registration revenue directly from their own payment solution provider. This even includes processing fees that some partners add to their registrations. This policy helps leagues pick the best payment solution for their needs and collect all of their revenues directly without interference from a third party. LeagueApps sends an invoice to our partners at the end of the month after all transactions, refunds, credits and volume discounts have been processed so that the total monthly fee can be calculated.

Starting in February (for January 2013 invoices), all LeagueApps partners will be able to track and pay their monthly invoices to LeagueApps from within the admin console. League partners can also add their billing information for automatic recurring payments (like you can do for a cell phone or cable bill).

The benefits this provides for our league partners include:

• Convenience with quick access to billing details and payment options
• Monthly email notification with all invoice and transaction information
• Automatic monthly payments help budget and avoid outstanding invoices
• Easily review past invoices

The bottom line is that however you were tracking and paying your invoices to LeagueApps is now easier and more convenient. Please check out our help site articles for all the details on the invoicing and automated billing features.

The LeagueApps teams is excited as this feature allows us to spend less time on administration and bookkeeping and more time building a great platform for our partners.

Please reach out to LeagueApps if you have any questions regarding the monthly billing process, your invoice history or would like to learn more about this process.

LeagueApps Loves Professional Designers

Feature Highlight

Professional designers makes LeagueApps look good! LeagueApps can be a digital blank canvas, and professional designers are the artists that create the website masterpieces. They are the ones that best understand how to design a LeagueApps site to best utilize all of the different features by maximizing the value of our design tools.

It is vitally important for sport organizations to create a design and theme that embodies the organization’s brand. Having the right logo and website design is critical for sport organizations. The website or logo is often the first impression for new members. People feel more comfortable when they’re on a website that has an impressive design. This becomes especially important when it comes to online registration and payments. A clean and sharp design also makes it much easier for site visitors to use tools like registration, schedules & standings and widgets.

How LeagueApps Partners With Professional Designers:

It is easy for designers to use LeagueApps. Creating a unique look and feel that captures your brand is easily attainable using our design tools. Designers will have access to the LeagueApps Design Playbook – which is an online tutorial that gives them all the recipes for success with our tools. As part of the full launch package, we will even facilitate and fully support that designer as they build out their full or integrated LeagueApps site design! We make it easy for designers to use LeagueApps for design. Here’s a quick list of the tools that we have to make the designer’s job easier:

• Theme Editor
• Help Documents
• Widgets
• Fully Customizable CSS

Professionally Designed LeagueApps Sites:

Delaware Sports League

Delaware Sports League is a very attractive example of an integrated LeagueApps site design. We worked with DSL to implement our registration widgets onto their existing homepage (see above). You can learn more about widget integration and customization here. In addition to the widgets on their homepage, we also helped DSL create a seamless registration site that’s externally linked to and hosted directly on LeagueApps (see below). This DSL LeagueApps site has a custom logo and a customer header. You can learn more about implementing your own logo and header here.

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Charlottesville Sports & Social Club

Charlottesville Sports & Social Club is a clean and eye-catching example of a full solution LeagueApps site design. C’ville is a great example of a true LeagueApps full solution site, meaning their entire site is hosted on LeagueApps, but with the help of a custom design. Their logo, header and all images are custom and were designed and uploaded into their LeagueApps site. (Learn about a custom logo, header and images here).

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NAKID Social Sports

NAKID Social Sports is an organization that has leagues in Austin, DC, and Denver – and subsequently they have three different full solution LeagueApps sites that combine into one. They are a great example of how an organization with different locations can use LeagueApps. All of NAKID’s sites have a custom logo, a custom header, a custom footer and custom CSS. Using the Custom CSS panel in the LeagueApps Theme Editor allows you to add any additional CSS styles you want. Learn more about custom CSS here.

How To Find A Good Professional Designer:

Give us a call at 1-800-257-3681! We can help advise and support you and your team as you look to find the right design partner to work with LeagueApps! It can often be tricky finding the right design resources that fits into your budget. We have plenty of recommendations, referrals, and ideas for how you can implement the design you have always wanted within the awesome tools and values of LeagueApps!

Stripe: The Easiest Payment Solution For LeagueApps Partners

Feature Highlight

Setting up a payment solution was often the one tricky item that could get in the way of quickly processing registration payments through the LeagueApps system. It was just way more complicated and expensive than it needed to be. That changes today!

LeagueApps is excited to announce a new partnership with the Stripe payments platform. Stripe has a number of incredible benefits for sports leagues, events or tournament registration.

Get Setup in Minutes

It takes just a few minutes to get setup and begin processing online registration transactions. The Stripe online application form asks for basic information and partners are approved instantly. Accounts can be created by using either a personal social security number or a business EIN number. The entire process can be completed online right within the LeagueApps setup flow. Read the LeagueApps help article to learn the exact steps to setup your LeagueApps account with Stripe.

No longer are the days of having to learn about payment gateways, merchant accounts, rolling reserves, API keys or completing lengthy applications!

No Setup or Monthly Fee

That’s right. With Stripe there are no setup fees, no monthly fees, no card storage fees, no hidden costs: you only get charged when you earn money.

A major sticking point for some of our partners was around monthly service fees. This was especially problematic for smaller organizations that did not have the budget to incur monthly fees or seasonal leagues that only have registration periods once or twice per year.

Flat Transactions Fees

Stripe charges a flat fee of 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction for all payments including American Express cards (which often have higher fees). This flat rate makes it easy to project payment processing costs for your organization.

Payments Direct To Your Bank Account

Enter your bank information into your Stripe account and payments will flow directly into your bank account once the payments are cleared. Every day, Stripe transfer the money that you charged seven days previously. Note that all funds are automatically transfered to your account (7 days from time of transaction). Nothing to do, nothing to worry about!

If these benefits are intriguing then the Stripe solution might be the right one for your organization. Be sure to learn all about the different payment solutions that can be integrated into LeagueApps. Contact us at 1-800-257-3681 to discuss the best option for your organization.

Fully Hosted Website vs. Integration and Widgets

Best Practices, Feature Highlight

LeagueApps is developed so that our partners can get the most value and benefit from the platform and features based on their needs. The truth is that LeagueApps technology and software is only as good as how well it serves our league partners. You’re the Karl Malone to our John Stockton.

One major item that we often discuss with new and existing partners is the decision to implement the fully hosted website solution or integrate the LeagueApps features and backend system into their exisiting website. Since this is an important aspect of utilizing LeagueApps, we figured it would be worthwhile to openly share the framework of how we like to think about it.

First, it’s important to note that the LeagueApps team is impartial to either setup. There is no difference in pricing, features or setup. Both solutions allow for leagues to customize the look, feel and design of their website. Both work with our mobile and social media products. So our main goal is to help our partners understand all of the aspects of both solutions and then help determine what works best for their organization.

Fully Hosted Website

In the fully hosted solution, a partner will use LeagueApps to develop and design their complete website. This means that the actual website will be completely hosted on LeageuApps. Partners will utilize LeagueApps features including homepage templates, content tools, theme editor and custom domain settings to build out their full website. Partners that use our full website solution include Midwest Sports Complex, KC Sports Leagues and Coed Sports Arizona

The fully hosted solution is optimal for partners that are looking to create a brand new website and start from scratch. In the future, we hope to further assist these partners by also recommending professional design partners to help create all of the unique aspects of design that enable a partner to further promote their brand and culture.

Integration & Widgets

This configuration is best suited for leagues that have already invested in developing their website and are more interested in utilizing LeagueApps features such as online registration and payments, schedule, results and standings modules, messaging tools, database management, etc. These features can either be linked to directly from within your existing website or can be incorporated through javascript widgets (generated by LeagueApps). This help article explains widget integration steps and procedure in more detail. LeagueApps offers widgets for online registration, schedules and standings, member login and email subscription lists. Properly using widgets further ensure a seamless experience by adding dynamic content to your site.

A major goal of the integration solution is to make sure the experience for participants and members is smooth and seamless. If integrated properly, league members will remain within the same, or very similar, look and feel of the league website with all of the added functionality of LeagueApps baked in! Checkout this list of some of our partners that use widgets for an integrated solution.

Integration also works well for leagues that are utilizing a full Content Management System such as Joomla, WordPress or Drupal that have powerful website development tools. Integration is also a good option for a partner on a tight launch deadline that needs a quick solution. We originally helped Big D Sports in Dallas launch their integrated solution in less than 72 hours so that they could open registration on time.

While the LeagueApps teams can share examples and make recommendations this is a decision that should ultimately be made by our partners. There’s no commitment though. A partner can start one way and then change at anytime based on their needs or comfort level. Social Boston Sports originally used a integrated solution (with a special single sign-on widget) but ultimately decided to become a full solution partner when they relaunched their website. Overall, our partners are actually split pretty evenly between the full and integrated solutions.

Regardless of what solution our league partners utilize, it’s our goal to provide the best platform and service possible to help our partners operate their organization and reach their goals. So call us at anytime at 1-800-257-3681 or shoot us a note. I’m confident we can find a way to work together.

LeagueApps Makes it Easier to Schedule Divisions!

Feature Highlight

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

Feature Highlight

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

Feature Highlight

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!

Feature Highlight

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

Feature Highlight

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!