LeagueApps Sponsors The SSIA Sport and Social Industry Conference

Press

The LeagueApps team recently sponsored and attended the 2012 Sport & Social Industry Conference in St. Petersberg, Florida on January 19th-20th. The conference, organized by the Sport & Social Industry Association, brought together over 40 of the top sport & social clubs throughout the country. Here is a list of all of the SSIA member organizations.

LeagueApps/Sportsvite currently partners with many of the sports clubs attending the conference through the LeagueApps platform, Sportsvite league profiles or past RSN sponsorship programs and activations. It’s always great to catch up with so many partners and friendly friends in one place (especially in warm weather!).

LeagueApps met all of the clubs during the sponsor roundtables.

Through both formal presentations and casual conversations (where a few beverages may have been consumed) we were able to learn so much about the opportunities and challenges for sport and social clubs. Being the digital guys, we were eager to get a better grasp of how digital solutions and platforms are succeeding and where more needs to be done.

We shared our vision for how we want to partner with sports clubs through league management software, promotion and marketing tools, develop digital monetization opportunities and create social and engaging features that allow members to further enjoy their sports club experience on and off the field. We also had a chance to demo the LeagueApps platform to all of the clubs. There were lots of interesting conversations around mobile applications and social media platforms.

Jeff having a drink and talking sports.

LeagueApps would like to say thanks to the SSIA and Tampa Bay Club Sports for organizing the event. Please let us know if you are interested in learning more about the SSIA and we can put you in touch directly with the organizers. We’d also like to express our gratitude to all of the member clubs and other sponsors that support the recreational sports industry! It was also very cool to meet Nico Marcolongo and his service dog. He runs a non-profit organization called Operation Rebound which provides opportunities for disabled military veterans to compete and enjoy sports!

Introducing the “LeagueApps Wall”

Release Notes

Carrying on the theme of social integration, the LeagueApps team kicks off 2012 with another Facebook-related feature with the release of our very own “LeagueApps Wall”! We developed the Wall to continue to encourage social interaction with and between your members and to keep them excited to be a part off your sports organization.

The wall goes hand in hand with the on-the-field experience by providing players with a digital space to chat, build stronger connections, and be more social. The wall also gives you the ability for league organizers to communicate with your members quickly and effectively, helping your well-oiled sports machine run even more efficiently. Plus, the “wild card element” of the wall is its seamless integration with Facebook. Each time you or your members make an update, it can publish any post through Facebook.

The LeagueApps wall comes in several forms:

Each wall type has its own functions and social benefits. Learn how to post to each wall in our Help article.

Announcement Wire

The Announcement Wire is “home base” for site users. Many of our league partners have created central message-boards on the homepages of their sites, where league organizers manually post updates to their members. So we built the announcement to streamline the process of making site-wide announcements. Now, you can post updates by simply clicking the “Make an Announcement” button in your console, then writing your message. Updates can include game cancellations, changes in registration dates, or game recaps/highlights.

The Announcement Wire allows you to share posts on your Facebook page, so you can update your site AND facebook fan page simultaneously. Sharing posts on Facebook also lets you use Facebook as a promotional tool to attract more site visitors, recruit player signups, and generate buzz for your sports organization.

You have the option to include a wall in each of your member’s dashboard. The content of this wall is identical to the one on your homepage. You can choose to include either a wall on your homepage, member dashboard, or both. It’s completely up to you and where you think your members prefer to view their site announcements and updates.

Program Message Wall

The program wall is a program-wide forum where players across all teams can post comments and voice their opinions. It is found on each of your site’s program pages, labelled “Announcements & Messages“. Players have the option to post general comments, or make comments specifically about the schedule or standings. Some examples for schedule/standings – related comments might be alerts about a schedule conflict, a call for the admin to update the standings, or some good-old fashioned trash talking from one player to another. Players can also share posts on Facebook.

As admin, you have the ability to disallow the Facebook Share option, disable program members from making posts, or disable any program wall altogether. You can also make posts that will appear on the program wall of your choosing. This wall is best used to communicate to team captains. Examples of such comments: rain delay, more females needed in a coed league, announcement of a schedule change, etc.

Team Message Wall

The team message wall is a team’s clubhouse, or locker-room. Appropriately labelled, Team Chatter, this is where teammates interact – they can pump each other up before games, recap their performances, vote for the squad’s mvp, or do whatever else it is that teams do. Team players can really benefit from the social aspect of the wall. It’s a great way to build that camaraderie that every winning team needs!

The team wall is also an informational tool. Team Captains can easily get in touch with their players and use the wall to communicate team-wide messages. For example, they can remind players to pay their fees, give alerts on game delays, or ask for a head count before an important game. Players can stay on top of their team chatter by electing to get email notifications whenever a post is made.

Players can choose to share their posts on Facebook, or they can make their posts private (only teammates can view). Additionally, admins don’t have the ability to post to team walls. This makes the team wall all the more intimate and personal for only teammates to share (no cameras allowed!).

Let us know how you’re utilizing the LeagueApps Wall feature. We love feedback. We’re available if you have any questions, issues, or suggestions. Hit up Asaf at 646-660-9430 or at awiner@sportsvite.com.

LeagueApps Introduces Facebook Registration and Login

Release Notes

LeagueApps is proud to announce the completion of the next phase of our Facebook integration project by using the Facebook Developers platform to launch Facebook Connect and Registration Login.  The overarching theme of our Facebook projects is to help league partners increase member engagement and create a better experience for the organization, teams, and the players themselves.  The Facebook Registration plugin does that by allowing league members to signup and login to their LeagueApps account using their Facebook credentials.  Thus, members can utilize their Facebook identity on the LeagueApps site and get more social with their teammates and fellow participants.

We are currently looking for initial launch partners for our new Facebook app. Please contact us to learn more and get your LeagueApps account hooked up with Facebook.

Below are some key benefits for integrating Facebook with your LeagueApps account:

Account Convenience

The Facebook registration plugin allows your members to connect their LeagueApps site accounts with Facebook- provided that they have Facebook accounts (hopefully they are among the 800+ million who do!).  Anytime new members register for your LeagueApps site, they can signup and login using Facebook.  The same holds true for any returning members- Facebook registration will let them bypass the login process with one simple click of the ‘Login with Facebook’ button.  This saves them the hassle of having to remember their LeagueApps login credentials. It also simplifies the registration process for all new members leading to more successful completed registrations.

Get Social

Connecting LeagueApps accounts with Facebook can help your members initiate social connections that can go beyond the playing fields. Players can view their teammates’ Facebook profiles who connect their account.  They can then ‘friend’ all of their teammates on Facebook and tighten their rec sports relationships.

Additionally, players using Facebook registration can opt to use their Facebook profile photos for their LeagueApps member profile.  Photos are especially handy on free agent teams where players don’t yet know one another, allowing player to match names with their teammates’ faces.

Member Retention

One of our main goals is to ultimately improve our league partners’ member retention rate each and every season.  From an organizer’s standpoint, more social interaction and camaraderie between players leads to better member retention.  Facebook can help by encouraging members to be social and engaged.  Not to mention that your website’s social features are as good a selling point as any for your organization.  Specifically, Facebook is yet another way to get your players excited about where your organization is going and ensure that they’ll be back next season.

More To Come…

We’ll continue to develop more Facebook features for LeagueApps. Many of these features will leverage your members who connect their account to their Facebook profile. These features include feed publishing, more Facebook Apps and more photo and video modules.

If you are interested in participating in our launch program or have questions about this Facebook project, please reach out to Brian at at brian@sportsvite.com.

LeagueApps Holiday Hackathon

Press

Last week the entire Sportsvite/LeagueApps team gathered together in NYC for team meetings, strategy sessions and most importantly some good old team bonding and holiday revelry in the form of a Bowling Bowl tournament. Here are the results for those scoring at home.

To mix things up a bit we decided to hold a half-day, mini “hackathon”. For the non-techies out there, A hackathon can loosely be described as a free-spirited event where developers collaboratively build a program, application or feature over a condensed period of time. It’s almost like a pickup game for developers. For our LeagueApps hackathon we incorporated the entire team so even our sales, marketing and account management teams “hacked” up and contributed to the project.

After discussing social media and digital engagement around sports participation in earlier meetings during the week the team was eager to build something “social”. We’re already working on Facebook projects but haven’t yet really had the chance to dive into Twitter. So we decided our hackathon would focus on leveraging the Twitter platform for sports leagues.

Early in the afternoon we hijacked all of the [212] Media conference rooms and split the project into different tasks that incorporated research, product management, development, design, marketing, account management and corporate relations. Each member of the team discussed their preliminary objectives and we agreed to meet one hour later with each of our plans and tasks.

When we reconvened, our product team had decided the scope for the project and developed a half-day project “sprint”. They were going to build a twitter button to easily allow players to tweet out information from a LeageuApps program page. We would also integrate bit.ly link structure to make it easier to track. We shared some quick research that more than half of our LeagueApps partners were actively using twitter and many had already incorporated twitter into their league website. After some rapid fire questions, answers and information-sharing everyone understood what needed to get done by the end of the day.

While we were all eager and excited for the end result, we soon realized the real value of the project was to work together in real time and better understand and appreciate each other’s roles. It felt like a classic championship team first coming together and gelling!

By the end of day we had made our first foray into Twitter and launched the new feature. You can learn more about it in the blog post that our account management team published. Our product and partnership teams also created a support article for more detailed information on how the feature works. We talked through our product roadmap for twitter and hashed out best practices for how local sports leagues can leverage twitter. We also created a marketing survey for our league partners to learn more about how they use twitter and where they see value in it. In less than a day, we had not only developed the first twitter feature for LeagueApps but we also had a very clear path for what we want to accomplish moving forward.

After such a great day of teamwork and accomplishment we felt like big leaguers. So naturally we capped it off by acting like pros and autographing a bucket of baseballs. The limited edition balls will be awarded to some of our corporate partners as a holiday gift and thanks for their support (got to keep the front office happy!).

Happy Holidays From Team Sportsvite!

Twitter For Your Sports Organization

Best Practices

An important theme for LeagueApps in 2012 is helping sports organizations leverage social media. LeagueApps has recently launched some Facebook integration features. We also love to use Twitter and built our first twitter feature within LeagueApps during our Sportsvite team hackathon in NYC last week.

Much like Facebook, Twitter is a popular digital platform that can be effectively leveraged by local sports organizations. With over 100 Million active users, sports organizations are bound to find new and perspective league members through twitter. Twitter is a natural way to make announcements and have conversations with your members as well as attract new players. Twitter is also free to use and easy to setup and manage.

Here are some best practices and tips on how to use twitter for your sports organization. We recommend using a twitter client like Tweetdeck to manage and organize twitter accounts, conversations and searches. Be sure to also download a twitter app for your mobile device.

Tweet!

The most important and effective step is to tweet regularly. This signals that your organization is active and friendly on twitter and helps attract others to follow, read and interact with your tweets. Many sports organizations use twitter to quickly share information or tweet announcements about registration periods, weather conditions or league information. We also encourage leagues to share league highlights and tweet about specific teams, games or players. Peer recognition can be a powerful tool in rec sports. Tweet photos, blog posts or create quick informal polls/questions to your members.

Tip: Be sure to include links in your tweets so readers can easily get more information. Use bit.ly or another link shortener to track clicks.

Follow Your Members

Twitter provides a great opportunity to learn more about your members AND develop direct communications with them. Email address book contacts can be imported into Twitter through their import tool. Once you are following your members, you can monitor their tweets and tweet back or retweet anything that relates to your league. An added bonus of following your members is that they will often follow you back as well.

In fact, your organization should be following anyone that can affect your business including local media, competitors, vendors, employees and trade associations or local government.

Attract More Followers

Most popular twitter accounts grow organically. Regularly publishing interesting and entertaining tweets is the best way to grow. Following your members also leads to getting followed back. Be sure to promote your twitter account on your website (use twitter widgets), facebook page and at all league activities and events. Try rewarding players that follow you by welcoming or re-tweeing them directly. Give them props for sending “in-game” tweets (If and when appropriate). @ messages are a good way to reply since they are public and enable others to see you engaging with your members.

Use Twitter Search

Create and save Twitter searches for conversations or mentions that include your organizations name, brand, or other keyword terms. Follow or engage these people so that they are talking to you instead of about you. Enter the conversation in an appropriate manner (No spam!) by sharing instant coupons or specific individual responses.

Create A League Hashtag

Once you master the twitter basics and are engaging with your league members it’s time to create a league hashtag. Whenever your members tweet about your league they can include the specific hashtag. This allows your online community to all follow the same hashtag and promotes conversation between members in the league.

Additional Twitter Benefits

Twitter can also be a great tool for better customer service, attract and activate sponsorships or partnerships and generate press or media attention.

Shout out to some of our league partners that are already doing a great job with Twitter including @Kickball365, @gameonphilly, @socialboston, @portsports, @TheBigDsports. We’d like to hear how your organization uses Twitter. Please share what has worked effectively. We plan to do more in the future to integrate Twitter into the LeagueApps platform.

Promote your Programs with Twitter!

Feature Highlight

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.

LeagueApps Referral Bonus Program- Spread the Word!

Release Notes

Here at LeagueApps, we value the relationships we have with our sports league partners. Without them we’re just lots of lines of code.  In an effort to strengthen these partnerships and expand our network, we will reward our league partners who introduce LeagueApps to other sports organizations.  We are excited to announce LeagueApps Referral Program.

Many of our partners have asked about referral programs in the past and many have already made referrals for us. We’re flattered every time we get recommended from an existing customer.  Starting now, you can earn LeagueApps credit or cash by simply inviting an organization to use LeagueApps – whether it is to power leagues, tournaments, events, or camps.

Our referral program is a win-win.  You earn a bonus when you refer someone and they start to process transactions on LeagueApps.  Your bonus compensation can reach up to $250 per organization, depending on the amount of transactions processed by your referral.  Referrals are powerful because they bring us new league partnerships, which in turn will help us grow our platform and build a better product.

How to Make a Referral

Find your unique Referral Link in your LeagueApps admin console.  Simply click on the Referral Program icon on the right side of your site dashboard (shown below).  You can also reach this page by following these steps in your admin console: “Manage Account > Referral Program”.

Then scroll down to the middle of the page, where you will find your referral link.  You can share the link in the following ways:

1. Copy the link and paste it into an email, blog, social network, etc.
2. Invite Friends from Facebook and Twitter by hitting the Share on Facebook or Share on Twitter buttons.  (NOTE- since Twitter only allows 140 characters, you might want to use bit.ly or another service to shorten your referral link when you tweet.)
3. Invite Friends by Email using the built-in email form.  The email will automatically include a link with your referral code.

If you know of an organization that can benefit from our platform, follow the steps and participate in our referral program.  We only expect you to refer us if you believe in our product.

If you have questions please get in touch with Asaf at awiner@sportsvite.com, or 646-660-9430.

Thanksgiving Weekend Update: Introducing Member Matching

Release Notes

Happy Turkey everyone! Here at LeagueApps, we are thankful to all the league organizers we work with and the great partnerships we have developed. This Thanksgiving we added a Member Matching feature that can help you fill up your rosters during Winter registration.

The Member Matching feature gives team captains the ability to find free agents and add them to their teams on their own. Specifically, captains can now browse the list of free agents in a particular program and invite any player to join their team. Team Captains can view the free agent pool by selecting ‘Players’ on the League Profile page, then sorting by Free Agent role.  Additionally, there is the option to sort by Gender, which can come handy if a team only needs male or female free agents. In addition to inviting free agents, captains can also send a customized message.

Member Matching can be effective in making your registration process faster and more efficient. Previously, some of our league organizers have been spending a lot of time manually adding free agents to teams, or compiling free agent lists for their captains and then coordinating with them on who to invite.  Instead, captains can now be responsible for recruiting players and completing their own rosters- with no help from the admins.  Ultimately, this takes the burden off the admins and frees them up to worry about other important tasks during registration.

We are always thinking about building social features that can further streamline the registration process. If you have any thoughts or feedback, we’d love to hear them.

Configure Your Facebook Settings in Less than 3 Min!

Feature Highlight

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.

Connect your Facebook Page to LeagueApps!

Release Notes

The LeagueApps – Facebook integration project is now live! For those who don’t know, integrating Facebook features into the platform is a main product focus at LeagueApps these days. The goal of our Facebook integration project is to help our league partners grow their Facebook fan base and streamline their promotional activities through Facebook. Plus, we want to help get your members more engaged so that they keep coming back to your website (and the playing field!). This release is the first step towards fully incorporating Facebook into your LeagueApps.

An organization can now link their Facebook Page to a LeagueApps account. Facebook Pages are a great place to post fresh content, such as photos, videos, announcements, events and more. Facebook can be a great vehicle for connecting with your existing members, promoting activities and offerings, and ultimately gaining a larger following. Click here for a comprehensive overview of Facebook Pages.

If you don’t have a page set up, you can create a Facebook Page here. By connecting your Facebook page to your LeagueApps account, you will be able to leverage the full scope of integrated Facebook features that we plan to offer in the future.

Get started by following these steps to connect your Facebook Page:

1. Scroll to the Facebook Tools button on the right side of your Site Dashboard.  Click the Setup Now link, which will take you directly to the Facebook Settings page under the “Settings > Social” tab in your admin console.
2. Enter your Facebook Page URL (e.g. http://facebook.com/LeagueApps)
3. Once you have entered your Facebook Page URL, a list of Facebook widgets and buttons are enabled. Simply select which items from the list you would like to be automatically incorporated into your site.

Ex. Prompt your members to ‘Like’ your Facebook page after completing registration.

These widgets and buttons are strategically placed to optimize ‘Likes’ on your Facebook Page. Again, the goal is to ramp up promotion of your Facebook Page and get those ‘Likes’ up! The Like button is important because it lets your members share their content with their Facebook friends. When a user clicks the Like button on your site, a story appears in their friends’ News Feed with a link back to your site.

Below is an example of how your Facebook Likes will appear on your Site Header and Footer:

Here is an example of the overlay that appears after a member completes registration. Your members will be prompted to ‘Like’ your Facebook Page in one final step before leaving the registration page.

Stay tuned for more Facebook updates, including Facebook Connect, Facebook Apps, and much more.

We’re available if you have any questions, issues, or feedback when using these new features. Feel free to contact our Account Manager Asaf, at 646-660-9430 or at awiner@sportsvite.com.