Use the Post Code Locator to help more participants find you

If your club, league or association utilises a SportingPulse Membership database, you have the ability to reach out to more prospective members and participants, simply by taking five minutes to input some numbers.

You have probably seen websites within your sport that have a function called the ‘Club Finder’, ‘Postcode Locator’ or something similar… what you may not have realised is that the search results display information that comes directly from the database.

By adding in the four-digit postcodes of your suburb (and surrounding suburbs) into the Locator section of your membership database, users of these search tools will be able to find you much easier.

This process should take you only a few short minutes, and only needs to be undertaken once.

Don’t forget surrounding suburbs

As important as it is to indicate the suburb where your club is located, it is probably even more important to include the surrounding suburbs too.

Let’s use the example of a family living in the inner suburban Melbourne suburb of Caulfield (3161), and they have a child who is interested in joining the nearest AFL Auskick program.

They might visit the Auskick website (www.aflauskick.com.au) and use the Centre Locator tool on the home page, by typing in ‘3161’ into the search field.

But their nearest centre might not actually be in Caulfield itself - it might be in a nearby suburb such as Elsternwick, Malvern or Ormond.

If you are an administrator for the Ormond Auskick centre, you’d obviously want any kids from Ormond being able to locate you – but you’d certainly also want kids from Caulfield being able to find you, contact you, and come and participate with you too.

Where to enter post codes into the database

Your club, league or association’s post code information can be found in the ‘Locator’ section of your database, in a field labeled ‘Postal Codes Serviced’.

How many post codes is too many?

Obviously this will differ depending on your location, but as a general rule of thumb we recommend entering in somewhere between 6 and 10 relevant post codes.

Inputting too few post codes runs the risk of less people finding you, but inputting too many post codes runs the risk of the search results becoming too diluted and less meaningful (i.e. becomes harder for people to find you!)

• Click here for more information about Sportzware Membership

More website changes go live!

Users of our SportingPulse network websites will today notice a raft of changes that have gone live, as part of our second phase of upgrades which began late last year.

These new changes are a mix of front-end and back-end changes - i.e. some will be visible to all site users, while others will be noticeable only to website editors – and we hope they are positively embraced by our community of grassroots sport users.

Here is a quick summary of the main changes:

1. Domain Name Management

Website editors now have the ability to assign a sportingpulse.net domain to their site automatically – for example, yourclubname.sportingpulse.net.

When compared to the long and complex SportingPulse URL’s you often find in your browser when navigating your website, this shorter web address (URL) can greatly assist in the promotion of your website to your members and supporters.

2. Improved Media Library Functionality

We’ve responded to your feedback about the Media Library, and in particular the ability to sort your albums, and we’re pleased to announce this is now a reality!

You can now sort your albums by simply dragging and dropping them using the arrow-heads, and we’ve also added a ‘Public’ checkbox on the main Media Library page which enables editors to quickly select which albums they want (and don’t want) appearing on the Photo Gallery page on their site.

3. Major Sponsor Widget

When we launched the new phase of our SportingPulse Network sites, we had some good feedback about the ‘loss’ of the left hand column, that in many cases was being used to show league and club sponsors.

As such, today we’ve launched a ‘Major Sponsor’ widget that has been created to give clubs, leagues and associations the ability to feature major sponsors in an extremely prominent piece of real estate on their site – at the very top of the right-hand column, above the Island advertisement.

This new widget can contain multiple sponsors - each with sponsor name, logo and description - and will rotate from one to the next on the site.

To activate, simply add a ‘Major Sponsor Widget’ from the Widget Manager, edit the details and then drag and move the widget to the top of your Widgets within the Widget Manager list.

• Click here for more information on the Major Sponsor widget from the SportingPulse Support site.

4. Photo Gallery Widget

At SportingPulse we’re all about giving your site more features while making you work even less – and that’s what the Photo Gallery widget is all about!

This widget has two configuration options - you can have it either with or without a larger image feature – and will simply display a collection of the most recent photographs you’ve uploaded to your Media Library.

• Click here for more information on the Photo Gallery widget from the SportingPulse Support site.

5. Social Media Widget

Our new Social Media widget will (at this stage) allow you to add a link to your Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as displaying your latest Twitter news feed. In future we hope to extend this widget to provide even more social media links.

Don't be scared to give it a crack - especially if you're an organisation that has a lot of good news, events and stats as the basis of your communication - e.g. a sports club!

• Click here for more information on the Social Media widget from the SportingPulse Support site.

We welcome and encourage any comments or feedback about these new features, and we hope website editors and users make the most of them.

Feel free to comment on the blog post below, drop us a line via email (support@sportingpulse.com) or visit our Facebook or Twitter pages.