Player communications

Running a tournament
is 10% organisation
and 90% dealing with people
who don't read their email.
(Martin, 2021)

Good player communications is critical to running a successful tournament. This includes regular updates weeks before the event, nudges just before and during the tournament, and alerts to changes as they come.

Two primary channels exist: email, and text messages, and you will need both. And both need accurate contact details, which is why we start out with…

Data hygiene

In theory, iSquash holds an email address and mobile phone number for each player, and these data are made available to you when people register. So much for the theory. The reality is that these data are often outdated, and that can be a pain.

Where you discover that these data are out-of-date, please do two things:

Edit the player's registration through iSquash for your tournament (List registrations → find player → Edit…) so that the next time you download the registrations table, the data will be accurate.
Nudge the player to update their data in their iSquash profile, for future events.

The ?Draw Maker does a fair bit of cleanup on the phone numbers, and it is worth the effort to ensure that by the time you're making the draws, you have a mobile phone number for each of your players, as well as an email address they read. Haha.

Text messages

In a world of messengers and social media, the most reliable way to get ahold of a player in New Zealand is still the good old text message. Most providers give you an unlimited amount of those to be sent, and that is good, because you will be making use of that a lot.

While it's of course possible to send each text message by hand, you'll really want a way to automate the sending of bulk messages. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a solution that does not involve coding (like I do), but please augment this wiki if you figure out ways to automate this.

Use cases for text messages:

Chase the first bulk email up with a text message to ensure people got the mail, or move it out of spam to increase the likelihood they won't miss the next one;
Alert the player to changes, or get their input on what's possible if a change is required;
Recruit players.

There is a little trick you can use to get at the iSquash-registered mobile phone number (or email) of any player in New Zealand: register them for your tournament! Half the time, their number shows up before you even add the player, due to the way the system works. And in the cases where only a land-line is shown, actually entering the person, downloading the registration table, and removing the person again will go completely unnoticed in 99.9% of the time. But you know what they say: with great power comes great responsibility, so don't abuse this.

Direct player communications

Once the draws have been made and loaded into ?TournamentControl, you can use the tool itself to send messages to your players. These messages are very powerful, as they are individually sent, and can include form fields, such as the name, as well as first game time. There is even infrastructure in place to get confirmation from a player that they have absorbed the information.

However, as TournamentControl doesn't get used until later in the process of organising a tournament, we need another way to send messages.

Bulk emails, Mautic, MailChimp & Co.

You can send bulk emails either directly from your email programme, or use a marketing tool, such as Mautic or MailChimp. Sending emails directly is vastly easier to do on an infrequent basis (but whenever you do, remember to use the Bcc field!).

If you're planning to send out emails on a semi-regular basis, or you run multiple events a year, it may well pay off to invest a bit of time into setting up a platform better suited for the task. Benefits include better email deliverability (though a lot still ends up in spam folders), as well as tracking of who opened your messages (though many clients now block this sort of tracking).

At Thorndon, we have a free MailChimp subscription to communicate with our members. I set up an additional "audience", and imported all the players from all our previous tournaments, tagging each contact with a tag to identify the source, e.g. 2021-04-open while importing contacts who played our April 2021 Open. If you make sure to select the "Update existing contacts" checkbox, you'll grow your audience in a smart way, and can later target them accordingly.

I also went through the list of contacts and tagged each Thorndon player with thorndon, and now I can easily send a message to e.g. all Thorndon players registered for the April Open by combining the two tags.

So once you've closed registrations, copy-paste the registrations table into the Mailchimp contact import tool, select "Update existing contacts", and make sure to assign a new tag, e.g. 2021-08-open. You can do the same for the waiting list, using e.g. 2021-08-open-wl. Now you're set, and you can easily send messages, e.g.:

To 2021-08-open, announcing that registrations have closed, to please alert of any changes to plans, and to inform you of dietary preferences, and the like;
A few weeks from the event, send another message to 2021-08-open, telling them that the waiting list is filling up, and asking people to let you know if they cannot play anymore. Remember: people will forget they have even registered;
Send a message to 2021-08-open-wl to keep your waiting list people "hot";
Announce the draws to 2021-08-open once they're done, and apologise to your waiting list people, inviting them to your next tournament;
Post-tournament, run a survey among players.
Etc.…

It is a bit of a pain to keep these tags up-to-date post-import, as changes come in. It is possible to automate this through the MailChimp API, but to date, nobody has provided the tool for this yet. So, when someone withdraws, you should manually remove the 2021-08-open tag, and when you move someone from the waiting list, swap the -wl tag for the main one. That way, you can always make sure that you are targetting exactly the right audience.

Closing words

Finally, remember to keep your messages short, and use bold-face to highlight the important few words in each paragraph.

No matter what you do, however, most people will not read the messages, so prepare to chase people up, and provide a lot of signage on site.

Next: Making the draws