Northfield Soccer Association

Updating a practice, letting families know the logistics for an upcoming game or event?  How do we do this with the new website?

The old standard is to craft an email message and "blast" it to your team email list.  Many of you are most comfortable doing that through your personal email account.  Others will look to using the website to send a message to your team.

Having been both a manager and on the receiving end of these emails, I can attest that many get lost in the mountain of emails received, and/or read on small handheld screens.  We need to encourage families to use the website, because it will make your jobs as Team Manager and their lives easier as well.

So let's try and get away from EMAIL...

Adding Events to your team calendar - When you add an event to the calendar, or update an existing event, an email is NOT going to be generated to your team automatically.  However, if the family is subscribing to the iCal feeds, they will received automatic updates and additions to their electronic calendars automatically. 

Notifying Families of a Change, Logistics, etc - You have the ablity to add "news" articles to your team home page.   An email is NOT going to be generated to your team automatically with the details of this "news".  However is the family is subscringing to the RSS feed for your team news, they will receive updates automatically.  Alternatively you can use the Windows commands to "copy" your news text and "paste" it into a message and send it to your Team Group. 

You can change the way these news articles appear, i.e. only the most recent news, the most recent 3 or 5, in detail or in summary, by editing the news "aggregator".  Please refer to the NGIN User guide for details, or NGIN support.

Encourage Families to Use the Website - First, identify any families that have limited or no access to the website, and determine how best to communicate with them.  But for the other families, we should be encouraging them to use the website...

With NGIN, there is the ability for the families to configure their own dashboard to house information on their player(s).  This will be particularly useful for those families with more than one player in the NSA program.  They also have the ability to "subscribe" to RSS and iCal feeds, having the website "push" the information to them.