If you are an organization running a youth sports program, this post is for you. You can now use a youth sports management platform to streamline, manage and promote your sports team and events with ease.
How to Chat & Email with Cinch. Teams
Communication is the most important part of organization for any team. If communication tools are simple and intuitive it encourages even more communication. When we designed the communication tools for Cinch we knew that there are two forms that were absolutely necessary: chat & email.
Cinch. Chat
https://vimeo.com/600390427
Cinch. Chat allows users to have simple and quick chat communication with any or all of their teammates. Many people don’t want to mix their sporting lives with their private lives. When it comes to text communication Cinch Chat allows all team communication to exist privately within the app. Whether it be live chat during a game or a conversation coordinating carpools, Cinch Chat makes it simple and easy.
Cinch. Email
https://vimeo.com/600395149
Cinch. Email utilizes your native mobile email client. What this means is that when you send a team email you can actually have people reply to you. Many other team apps allow team email, but it comes from a no-reply email address. Many times there are questions that arise from this email and the teammate has to create a new email so someone just to ask clarifying questions. With Cinch. Email utilizing your normal email all members can respond directly to the team email.
Why Sports Camps Are Worth Your Money
Many parents come across the question of whether or not it is worth all of the money to put their kids in sports camps. Many times they view it as glorified and expensive babysitting. While at times they may be right, youth sports camps provide many underlying benefits.
The unique times we are in have had a detrimental effect on our children. The social interactions that they missed out on have had a negative effect on their overall mood, behavior, development, and well being. Now that COVID has subsided in a number of states, and our children are primarily back at school it is the perfect time to put them into more social sports related activities. Sports camps are ideal because the majority of them take place outdoors providing the safety that we hope for when protecting against the virus.
Sports camps positively impact your son or daughter by enforcing teamwork, strategic thinking, and encouraging self-confidence, perseverance, problem-solving, independence, and responsibility. While sports camps differ from sports teams, camp programs still encourage physical activity and competition. Establishing a mindset of staying active will transfer into their teenage and young adult years.
The purpose of athletic sports camps is to teach youth about sports and other non-sport-specific skills. Camp programs help kids grow into well-rounded, healthy individuals who can try new things and push themselves to excel at anything in life.
They learn to work together, make choices, take responsibility, develop creative skills, build independence and self-reliance, and gain confidence. All are necessary steps on a child’s path to a healthy, productive life.
So next time you are wondering if it is worth the money to sign them up for that camp remember that it is much more than just hiring a babysitter for a few hours a day. You are paying to have them experience a number of lessons that help them to grow into amazing young people.
How to Market Your Programs with Cinch.
Marketing is one of the biggest challenges for youth sports organizations. Email is the primary way that organizations keep their members engaged. Recognizing this we built simple email marketing into Cinch. But we wanted more. Always trying to push boundaries, and knowing how most people spend hours a day on their mobile phone, we built in social marketing to the Cinch. platform. Below is a description of how each marketing vehicle works…
FEED
Organizations want to keep their members engaged. With Cinch. we built a suite of tools to keep your members coming back.
- The first step is to have your members “FOLLOW” your organization. They can navigate to your organization page in Cinch. and click the “Follow” button. This means that any contact that your organization posts will show up in their feed.
- The next step is to create a post. Cinch. allows you to add a photo, written content, and even a link to one of your organizations programs. Once published, the post will show up in the feed of all of your followers.
- Finally, if you have connected your post to a program, followers will be able to click on the post and be taken directly into registration for that program.
By creating exclusive content for your followers they are interested in coming back to see what is new.
Many organizations rely heavily on email marketing. Email is one of the most popular ways of staying connected with your members. With Cinch. you are able to communicate with your members simply and easily with our built in email system.
- Create a new email.
- Select the program that you would like to communicate with.
- Create your email content.
- Hit “Send.”
It is that easy. All of the members of the program that you selected will receive an email from your organizations email address.
Here at Cinch. we are always pushing boundaries to try and make the management of your organization more simple. Be sure to check back often for the new tools we are adding into our platform.
To see the marketing tools in action click below to schedule your demo today!
The Future is Mobile
It is a widely held belief that the future of many industries is mobile. Certainly this can be strongly argued when it comes to the world of technology. Many businesses have launched without having any kind of a web presence at all. Think of the countless apps that you have on your phone that don’t have a web app that goes with them. So why is the world of youth sports management any different?
With many organizations run by volunteers who are constantly on the go, the more mobile access that they have the better. Trying to manage their own children’s schedules, their work schedule, their family commitments, and probably much more, they ability to manage their duties to the youth sports organization they are helping while on the go is paramount.
Sports organizations, especially youth sports organizations, have to manage countless aspects of business. Many youth organizations are run by one of two kinds of people. Scenario one is where there are a group of parents who are usually volunteers that hold positions on a Board of Directors. Scenario number two is where a group of professionals manage all aspects of the organization. By professionals I simply mean a person who is paid full time to work for the organization.
A typical organization will select a software platform (or 10) to manage an aspect of their business. The basic issues that need to be managed are email marketing, player registration, payment, and email. Many programs require more than this but these are the bare essentials. Below is a list of some of the other services that are nice to have based on different programs:
- Camps: Email marketing, player registration, payment processing, email communication.
- Competitive: Tryouts, team building, team communication, scheduling, roster management, payment plans.
- Recreational: Player registration, team building, Team communications, team scheduling, Roster management, waitlist.
- School Sports: Tryouts, registration, team communication, scheduling, roster management.
As you can see there are many different issues that need to be managed in order to effectively run a program. Many organizations run multiple programs so when you combine all of the services needed it can become troublesome.
Very few of these services have experiences that are built for mobile. The large majority of this work has to be done on a computer. The problem with this is that for many organizations, the people managing all of these issues are also the ones that are out on the field. This makes it nearly impossible to do in an efficient and effective way.
So how do we fix this problem you ask?
Build for mobile first.
This is where Cinch. comes in. Knowing the pain points faced by organizations, and the fact that most staff are working out on the fields or courts, we wanted to build a software platform that was going to be extremely simple and intuitive to use while out on the field. We have felt the pain of printing out rosters every day, of not having enough pens for parents to use to check their players in and out of camp, of not having all of the players information or waivers available at all times, of not being able to easily have parents phone numbers or emails to send a text or call when their player is hurt or just wants to hear the assuring sound of mom or dads voice.
Athletic directors, Executive directors, coaches, managers, directors of coaching, camp directors and many more leadership roles require themselves to be out and about interacting with their members. In the traditional setup it is impossible to be both out interacting and keeping on top of the management of your program. Now that Cinch. Is an option all of your lives are going to become much easier. This will allow you to deliver a superior product to your members.
Schedule a demo today with one of our Cinch. specialists. Not only can they help show you what Cinch. can do for you, but our specialist have years of experience in the industry and are happy to share best practices.
Virtual Camp Management
Given the current social conditions, and the need for camp programs to adapt to a new kind of business, we wanted to encourage our customers to explore the idea of virtual camps. We thought we would write out guide to walk you through how to create a virtual camp using Cinch. and whatever video conferencing software you prefer.
Before you get started you will need to download the Cinch. HQ app for iPad from the App Store.
SETTING UP YOUR VIRTUAL CAMP
- Create your account and your organization on Cinch.
- Create a program for your virtual camp.
- You will want to decide which video conferencing software you will want to use for your virtual camp. One of our favorites is Zoom.
- You can create a scheduled Zoom meeting and it will give you all of the information people will need to join the meeting.
- You will want to copy this information and add it to the confirmation email that will get sent to all people who register for your virtual camp.
When a user registers they will be sent the confirmation email and will be able to join your virtual camp. Without the constraints of space you can now have hundreds of players at your virtual camp.
It is as simple as that!
Still have questions? Schedule a demo with one of our specialists today!
Touchless Check-in
Remember that first day of camp when you have to scan the spreadsheet trying to find a players name in a sea of text?
Those days are over!
Safety, security, freedom from fear. These are things we want to feel as parents. As an organization, you want to be able to provide all of these to your members.
Checking in players for a camp or event is one of the hardest and most time consuming aspects of the business. Parents have to wait in lines, kids are running around out of control, the administrators doing the checkin have to scan and find the player and hope that they are registered. Let’s not forget about the players that registered late and are not on your roster for camp.
With Cinch. HQ all of these issues are gone!
Parents walk up, scan in, and thats it. When they scan you get to see their picture and name and can greet them accordingly. You have a record of when they checked in and when they check out. You can provide that level of safety and accountability that parents are looking for. This safe approach allows parents who can’t be at drop off or pick up to know exactly when their players arrive or leave camp. All of a sudden one of the biggest headaches of running a camp or event is gone!
Schedule your demo today to see this feature in action!
Switching to Cinch.
Switching to Cinch. is extremely simple. Staying true to our mission of simplifying sports management we wanted to make switching to Cinch. follow the same philosophy. Most systems allow for you to import all of your members contact information and automatically create an account for them. The problem is that those members have no idea that they have an account. This creates countless problems when it comes to duplicates of data and overall confusion.
We decided to take a different approach.
Switching to Cinch. is a simple 3 step process that can be completed in less than 5 minutes.
- Step 1: Download Cinch. HQ from the App Store and create your account.
- Step 2: Create your program.
- Step 3: Tell all of your members to download the Cinch. app in the App Store or on Google Play and register for your program.
Members will create their own account with Cinch. before they register for the program. The beauty of this is that they will never have to enter their information again once they have created their Cinch. account. They will be able register for any program in less than 10 seconds.
Your members will be able to manage all aspects of their
account on their own from the convenience of their mobile phones. The Cinch. app is available for both iOS and Android and is free to download.
With Cinch. HQ you can manage all aspects of your program from the convenience of an iPad. This includes live roster data, touchless check-in, email and chat communication, and of course payments and refunds.
Simplify your life.
The Cinch. Story
Having worked in the youth sports world for many years we became frustrated at the software solutions needed to successfully run an organization. We needed one product for the website, another for registration, another for email, another for chats, another for collecting money and so on…
We had a vision that there could be one platform that allowed an administrator to manage all aspects of an organization from one place.
CINCH. WAS BORN.
WHAT IS CINCH.?
Cinch HQ. is an API driven sports management platform designed to simplify and streamline the management of sports camps and clinics. Cinch HQ. allows organizations to manage their entire business from the convenience of an iPad. Organizers can create a program with just a few simple taps and publish it to the public allowing players to register simply and easily from their mobile phone.
WHO IS CINCH. FOR?
Designed for both parents and administrators, Cinch. is for everyone. With Cinch. HQ administrators can create programs and manage their entire operation from an iPad. With the Cinch. mobile app parents can manage their households sporting lives from one app.
WHO IS CINCH.?
Cinch. Was created by a group of individuals who had met working in the youth sports industry. We had all felt the pain of managing an organization and instead of continuing to wait for a company to create what we needed we decided to build it ourselves. Who better to build a product than the people who were experiencing the problem first hand. With all of us having different professional experiences from UI, UX, engineering, marketing, and more, we wanted to build a product to simplify our sports management lives.
