One of the biggest challenges your athletic booster club will face involves efficiently sharing information with volunteers, parents, and athletes.
Getting the word out about fundraisers, concession stand needs, and upcoming ABC events is crucial to maximizing engagement and ensuring that you have the support you need to really deliver for the students.
The question is, what’s the best way to communicate with booster club members and volunteers? Let’s take a look at four common options.
Four Options for Communicating with Your Club
When it comes to sharing information with your athletic booster club, you have four core options:
1. SMS
Text messaging is perhaps the most convenient way to communicate with individual group members. You can even use this approach to reach small groups.
However, if you need to share information with dozens of volunteers and participants, SMS is far from the best method. Simply creating such a large group message can be tedious, to say nothing of the never-ending stream of alerts as everyone replies.
Privacy is another concern. Some booster club members won’t be too keen on the idea of sharing their personal numbers with school staff, parents, and athletes. With that being said, you may need to consider another option.
2. Email
Generally speaking, people are much more willing to share their email addresses than their phone numbers. Moreover, creating mass group email lists is incredibly convenient. However, email gives way to an entirely different problem: getting your recipients to open and read your messages.
Assuming your emails don’t get flagged as spam, you have no way of knowing who will actually open your messages. Some volunteers will be notoriously bad at checking their email, meaning they’ll likely receive information too late.
3. Chat
If you can get all of your members to download the same chat application, you’ll have no trouble communicating with your entire athletic booster club. Chat apps enable you to create a dedicated group for athletic booster club business. You can manage members, remove people from the group, and control who can post.
However, convincing everyone to download the same app can be tough. Even if they do download it, some members may leave notifications turned off, which can lead to miscommunications and overlooked information. That’s why you need a backup plan.
4. Mobile Apps with SMS Push Notifications
As you can see, all three of the aforementioned communication mediums offer both benefits and shortcomings. Therefore, you need a multifaceted solution that enables you to communicate with members along multiple channels. Enter a dedicated mobile app for athletic booster clubs.
A purpose-built mobile app for booster clubs allows you to deliver in-app communications and send push notifications to members who have downloaded the software. But even if users don’t download the software or enable in-app notifications, you can deliver SMS push notifications to ensure that they receive your communications.
If you want to simplify how you communicate and maximize athletic booster club participation, consider a mobile app with robust messaging capabilities. Doing so will help you transform your team into fundraising all-stars.
