Any experienced sports club owner and manager will tell you that one of the best ways you can establish trust, maintain consistency and transparency, and encourage commitment and loyalty within your sports club is to maintain an effective means of communication with your members, sponsors, partners, staff, volunteers, players, parents, and so on. Effective communication is one of the integral building blocks of a great and successful sports club, but the sad thing is that not many sports clubs spend enough time trying to establish a good line of communication among their members and everyone involved in the club. If you are aiming for growth and development and the proper promotional strategy and campaign for events, activities, games, and the like, you need to focus on appropriate communication as well. So how can you enhance communication within your sports club? Let’s find out.

Establish your audience

It’s important to establish who you are communicating with in the first place. The thing is that different individuals will respond differently to various forms of communication, so it’s better to ‘mix’ your messages depending on who you are addressing and the platforms or channels they would appreciate the most. If you are trying to communicate better with young parents and staff members, then email or social media is a good way to do it – sending out weekly updates would be an excellent idea, and you can easily do this as well by using the right platform such as membership softwares where you can send out email blasts, keep and maintain member records, set up schedules for training, and even send out requests for payment for membership fees, etc.

If you have older members, direct communication may also be appreciated, and you can do this through weekly meetings or updates where everyone is invited. The key is to find out what communication line works best for everyone and utilise this for your sports club.

Focus on visuals

While the way you communicate will depend on your audience, as already mentioned, almost everyone appreciates the right visuals as well. If you can, assign someone to be your sports club photographer, and he or she will be in charge of documenting events, games, practices, and so on. Afterwards, you can send the photos to your members and sponsors and everyone involved, and they will definitely appreciate the documentation and see for themselves what’s going on and how you are being active as a sports club. You can use these photos and post them on your social media account in order to pique interest and attract new members.

Keep it simple

Communication is essential if you want your club to grow and be properly promoted, but you should also make it a point to keep it simple. Try not to waffle and use ‘padding’ when sending out communication and messages to your members – most people don’t have the time to concentrate on long messages; you need to grab their attention and retain it with just a few key elements. When you are writing a message, try to make use of a catchy headline as well. Headlines, as well as opening paragraphs, are an excellent way to attract someone’s attention and retain it, so keep it on point and summarise whenever you can.

Image attributed to Pixabay.com