Tech Fest Tech Fest is a free virtual event by SportsEngine, Inc. where youth sports leaders come together to share best practices, make lasting connections, and above all, grow youth sports. Explore past event highlights below. Explore Tech Fest: Growing the Game Explore Tech Fest: All About Money Tech Fest: All About Money Take a deep dive into the tips and tricks you need to properly raise, collect, and manage money for your organization. Raising Money: Fundraising & Sponsorships Proper program funding is essential to keeping youth sports running—in this session, we explored best practices and tactical methods to maximize funding through sponsorships, donations, and selling custom team apparel. Explore Fundraising & Sponsorship Read more: Volunteer Keeps Cash Flowing for Youth Hockey Organization Four Major Perks of Switching to Online, Team Sports Fundraising Collecting Money See just how easy it is to collect money for your organization with SportsEngine HQ. Whether it's for a program, donation, merchandise, or gear, collecting money is important. In this session, we walked through the entire process of setting up sales items, creating payments plans, offering credits, and viewing order summaries. Start collecting with SportsEngine HQ Financial Reporting After you collect money, SportsEngine HQ makes it easy to manage it all in one place. In this session, we took a deep dive into the transaction, registration, and payout reporting tools available in SportsEngine HQ and how to leverage them for your own use. Start reporting with SportsEngine HQ Tech Fest: Growing the Game Miss the keynote? Watch the presentation with SportsEngine General Manager Brett MacKinnon and NBC Sports Analyst Corey Robinson: Session Recaps: Special Panel for Safety Building a Safety Program Collecting Money Gateway to Mobile Simplify Your Season Management Generate $$ for your org: Sponsorships & Fundraising Communicating Without Headaches How to Market your Organization + Leveraging the Olympics Promoting Your Business with GoMotion Embracing Technology in Returning to Play Exclusive Discount Purchasing with NBC ClubBuy Special Panel for Safety During the Getting Started with Safety panel, industry experts from the US Center for Safesport, National Council of Youth Sports, National Center of Safety Initiatives, USA Artistic Swimming and SportsEngine discussed the latest updates to industry mandates, guidelines and standards, and what that means for youth sports organizations and the families they serve. Didn’t make it to the session? Don’t worry, we made sure to capture the discussion so you can ensure your organization is up to date on the latest safety updates. Additional Resources NCYS Guidelines US Center for Safesport USA Artistic Swimming safety resource page USAAS Athlete Bill of Rights Building a Safety Program Now that you've put together your safety plan, we'll show you have to manage it in SportsEngine HQ using the membership and eligibility features. We'll show you how to create a membership, attach eligibility requirements, and how to get your membership to participants. As part of the talk, review of management ad tracking will be reviewed to show you how to save time and energy in ensuring participants are eligible. Collecting Money Financials can feel intimidating, so we focused on simplifying the process to collect money through registrations, invoices, and memberships. With the sale/payment as our center, we looked at what it takes to set up everything beforehand: configuring sales items, payment terms, and discounts. Then moving to post-sale, we went through adjusting payment dates, credits, and offline payments. We also included information about all the automated reminders sent by the platform and then finally getting money deposited into their bank account. Gateway to Mobile Rostering is the gateway to setting up teams, which allows coaches and teams to be more self-sufficient and increase parent satisfaction. You'll automatically add teams to the FREE mobile app, and unlock chat, messages, schedules, and more. It's easy to do, and may be the most important thing you can do in SportsEngine HQ. Simplify Your Season Management We heard you - managing teams, rosters and schedules across multiple seasons is challenging! Get a sneak peek into our next generation Season Management features and see how SportsEngine is reimagining the post-registration experience for league and clubs admins. Generate $$ for your org: Sponsorships & Fundraising Program funding is what makes it possible for youth sports to run and serve kids. In this session, we discussed best practices and tactical ways to maximize funding for your organization with sponsorship, fundraising, donations, and apparel & gear. To stay on your game, consider utilizing: SportsEngine HQ’s sponsorship builder, design center for banner ads, player memberships, in-registration donations, SportsEngine Marketplace’s turn-key donation platforms, and SportsEngine Gear delivering built-in fundraising without the hassle. Additional Resources Roadmap to success: Begin raising money Communicating Without Headaches Our session on communications covered the two primary areas of the platform organization admins will send messages from, Registrations and the Directory. We very briefly covered the benefits of sending messages from within a registration and the different messaging options available—plain text, rich text and page layout. Within the directory we discussed a few key scenarios such as creating filters to identify participants who have not yet signed up for this year’s registration, saving those filters as a smart group and sending messages to both smart groups and static groups. How to Market your Organization + Leveraging the Olympics During our marketing session, we discussed and demonstrated the functionality of one of the leading drivers of sign-up traffic: Program listings. Over 800,000 users visit the SportsEngine.com youth sports directory looking for sports programs, teams, and leagues in their area, and your free program listing is the front door to your organization. What’s more, anyone who creates a SportsEngine.com listing by June 30, 2021, has the chance to get featured on NBCOlympics.com throughout the games in July! We also covered some listing best practices to make sure your organization is at the top of the pack and attracting more eyes. We then covered our free design center, where you can create flyers, social media posts, posters, banner ads, and more. Lastly, we covered the best ways to use your new assets, plus additional tips and tricks including Google Analytics, SEO, and social media. Additional Resources Information on the Youth Sports Spotlight Sweepstakes Best Practices for Promoting Your Organization and Programs on SportsEngine.com How do I set up Google Analytics to monitor traffic? Improve website search ranking The power of SEO: A series MOZ SEO Basics Promoting your Business with GoMotion A small business marketing session turned demonstration for GoMotion’s newest suite of Tools; Business Publisher, introduced to the market in late 2020. Our GoMotion team of presenters went through some free business marketing tools that integrate nicely with our platform (Google My Business pages & Facebook Business pages) and then quickly took viewers through a high-level demonstration of using GoMotion’s Business Publisher to manage, solicit, and respond to their reviews. We touched on the power of social media marketing, the power of a healthy list of reviews/recommendations, and what that can do for the growth of your business. Managed all within the GoMotion platform! Additional Resources Setup a Google My Business Account Setup a Facebook Business page Embracing Technology in Returning to Play Youth sports technology has never been more relevant than it is today. Streamline running an org in today's complex environment. Plus, explore how the day-to-day features of HQ can be utilized for how your organization returns to play. Additional Resources Roadmap to Success: Your go-to guide to get all the actionable steps you need to run your org Exclusive Discount Purchasing with NBC ClubBuy ClubBuy is a group purchasing program under NBC Sports Group that provides procurement service for clubs and facilities in the sports and hospitality industries. With a focus on driving down cost and increasing efficiency, ClubBuy leverages the collective buying power of its member base to negotiate significant cost savings on products and services purchased every day. We are excited to bring this offering to youth sports organizations as a benefit to being part of the NBC Sports & Comcast family. No cost, no catch...just an opportunity to purchase the same items that are already on your list, but at a discounted price.