What this helps you do
Audiences decide who receives what, and every send goes to exactly one audience. The Hub never knows your schedule, your fixtures or who is on which team, so it cannot work out who a call affects: the league builds its structure as audiences and picks the one each call goes to. Audiences come in three kinds. An audience your LEAGUE ASSIGNS is structure you fill yourself: a team, Coaches & Team Contacts, Officials, the board, Playoff Teams. An audience PARTICIPANTS CHOOSE is a list on their preferences page: Volunteer Opportunities to start with. EITHER suits a division: you place registrants in their division and a family with players in two divisions can add the second. Whole League always reaches everyone currently on your list here, including past seasons' people until someone removes them. That is not your registration list or a roster.
When to use it
Build the structure before registration closes: the divisions first, the teams inside them once teams are formed, then Coaches & Team Contacts and Officials. Add a combination as its own audience when the league sends to it often, like U12 Coaches.
How to do it
- Open Audiences and create each division by name, set to Either.
- Create each team by name, set it to league assigns, and file it inside its division with Inside audience.
- Create Coaches & Team Contacts and Officials, set to league assigns, and fill them yourself. Never set them to participants choose.
- Put people in: an import's audiences column, Add people on the audience, or Bulk assign on Participants.
- If a message is for a combination, like the U12 coaches, create U12 Coaches as its own audience. One send never combines or excludes audiences.
- At season close, archive the team audiences you will rebuild. The people stay, so the league can reach them when registration opens again.
Example
The Saturday U12 games at North Park move after a permit is pulled. The field coordinator sends the change to U12 Division, then the same message to Officials. Nobody had to work out who plays where: the league chose two audiences, one per send.
Good to know
- Seeding Volunteer Opportunities created the list; it put nobody on it. Teams, Coaches & Team Contacts, Officials and the board are never seeded, because an open audience appears on every participant's preferences page.
- Inside audience is a placement check, not delivery. When you add people to a team yourself, only people already in its division can be added. A send reaches the people in the one audience you pick, never the audiences filed inside it. An import can place someone on a team without the division, so name both in the audiences column.
- Unticking a division on the preferences page removes only a division the person chose themselves; a placement the league made stays until the league removes it.
- A person can belong to more than one audience, like their team and Coaches & Team Contacts. Each send still goes to one audience, and a person in two audiences you send to separately receives both messages.
- A venue audience only works if the same people are always at that venue. If venues rotate, send to the division or to each team instead.
- When someone replies STOP they are removed from every audience, including their team, Coaches & Team Contacts and Officials. START turns messages back on but does not put them back.