Part of a good communication plan is ensuring you can reach people when you need to. Many parents will not digest important, timely information well over email. That’s just a fact of life. Make everyone’s life easier by setting up a simple text thread between all parents. Since most text services won’t let you have more than 20 names, you may need to split into two groups at the higher age levels. If you have to split:
- Have the assistance coach and team manager on both threads
- Split the family members between the two threads. What you’ll find is that sometimes one thread gets very noisey (oftentimes in a good way with photos, etc) while the other is not. This ensures each family gets the full story without your having to copy/paste everything between threads
- Clarify up front that you have to split into two threads and how you’ve done it so people understand that the thread may not hit every parent
Occasionally I get suggestions to use a texting app like Groupme which does not have the recipient limit. I would highly encourage this for Extra teams, but it’s overkill for Core to try to get your parents in the habit of using a new app just for one season.
When considering where to send important updates, the answer is always BOTH email and text. All updates should always go out over email, but here are the things that I typically text out in addition to email:
- Anything that is time sensitive (less than a day or so)
- Practice time changes
- Game day reminders
- Field status updates
- Reminders to complete action items
There’s nothing better than getting a last minute rain out notification and you have the text thread already in place for you to relay important info. Get it set up at the same time you’re setting up the roster on your website.
Team Snap allows for group chat through the app and sends pop up alerts to smart phones.