What this helps you do
Audiences group your families and volunteers so a message reaches the people it affects. You always have one Everyone audience that reaches everyone connected and cannot be deleted. Onboarding seeds a small set of starter audiences you can rename, archive or replace, covering the roles every league has: players and their parents or guardians, coaches, officials, volunteers and the board. On top of those you build the audiences your league actually runs on: age divisions, teams and locations. Open audiences appear as choices on each family's preferences page; closed ones such as your board or officials list are yours to assign and are never shown to families.
When to use it
Use audiences whenever a message concerns one part of the league: a permit pulled for one division's field, a makeup game for one team, a practice time that moved, an assignment change for the officials, a concession shift for volunteers, an equipment or uniform notice for one age group, or a board note that should stay in the room.
How to do it
- Open Audiences.
- Create an audience per division, per team and per location, named the way families say it: 12U, 14U, Adult Rec, Tigers, North Fields.
- Choose how people join each one: families choose it themselves, the league assigns them, or either. Set your board and officials audiences to league assigns.
- To nest teams inside a division, set Inside audience to the parent, for example Tigers inside 10U. A child audience only accepts people who are in the parent.
- Let families pick their divisions on the preferences page, and use Bulk assign from Connections for coaches and officials.
- Decide per audience whether replies to its Blasts are allowed. Leave replies on for volunteer calls and anything families need to ask about.
Example
On Thursday the city pulls the permit for one field and the 10U games move across town. The commissioner sends the new location and a map to the 10U audience only. The adult division, playing at a different park, never sees it, so nobody learns to ignore league messages.
Good to know
- A family with players in two divisions joins both audiences and gets both sets of updates.
- Sending to Everyone asks for a step-up confirmation first.
- Audiences are lists that families choose or you assign. There are no rule-based or dynamic audiences, so a roster export does not fill a division audience by itself; import it, then Bulk assign, or let families choose.
- At the end of the season, archive the audiences you no longer need; the connections stay for next season.