What this helps you do
Blasts gives your league a direct channel to families, players, coaches and officials, with their consent. Each person installs the free Blasts app once, usually on the phone that goes to the field, and connects to your league. After that, the weather delay, the field change and the volunteer ask land on that phone, clearly marked as from your league, instead of in a league-wide email or a group text someone muted. The Hub picks the right path for each person: someone already on Blasts gets a request in the app; someone who is not gets your invitation email with the enrollment code.
When to use it
Registration is the moment. Put the invitation in the registration confirmation, the payment receipt, the uniform-pickup handout and the coaches' preseason packet, and repeat it each season for new families. A second push on opening day catches the rest.
How to do it
- Open Connections in your Hub and click Sync connections once so your enrollment code is published.
- Add the enrollment code and QR code to the registration confirmation and receipt, and click Print the enrollment kit for the uniform-pickup table and the concession stand.
- Where the enrollment link is enabled for your Hub, paste that one standing link into the confirmation email and your website: each person who opens it gets their own enrollment page.
- Each parent, player, coach or official installs Blasts on their phone, opens Settings, enters the code and taps Join. Coaches can share the same code with their own team.
- For families who registered but have not scanned, export the opted-in roster from whatever you register in and use Add many at once or upload the CSV. Invitations are checked on Blasts and spread out at up to 200 a day.
- Point your registration form at the inbound webhook on Integrations, or use the Zapier app, so each new registrant is invited the day they sign up.
- Accept requests under People who want to connect, or turn on auto-accept in Settings during registration season.
Example
Spring registration opens in February. The code goes in the confirmation email and the kit sits on the uniform-pickup table. In March the registrar uploads the roster export for the families who did not scan, and those invitations go out over the following days. By opening day 340 of 400 families are connected, and the first rainout reaches them at 6:35 a.m.
Good to know
- Each parent connects on their own device, so a household with two phones is two connections. Group them under one household on the person page and use One per household when a mailing only needs one copy.
- The connection carries from season to season: returning families are already reachable when next year's registration opens.
- Connecting is consent-based: a family can mute or disconnect at any time, including when a player ages out.
- Import columns: your file needs an email column. The Hub also recognizes name, first name, last name, phone, address, birthday, household, and interests (a column headed audiences, tags, groups or lists works too). Files are limited to 5,000 rows and 2 MB, with a preview before anything is sent.
- There is no connector to a league-management or registration platform. Your roster reaches the Hub as a CSV export, through the inbound webhook, or through Zapier.
- This is Blasts, not SMS: no carrier fees, and no spreadsheet of parents' mobile numbers to collect or pass around.