• An intuitive, accessible layout for easy reading and browsing by your website users.
• Simple integration with your site – just include a couple of lines of code!
• Visual customisation using our Style Generator, with instructions for your webmaster on how to further customise in your own code.
• Easy to use administration from within the Sport Buoy content management system.
• Link directly to specific vacancies using the ‘#’ operator – if the vacancy is removed there’s no broken links!

Sport Buoy’s philosophy is simple – we want to support sports clubs of all sizes and all sports. As a result, the vast majority of our services are free right now and forever more. The only services we will ever charge for are ones which sports clubs can earn direct profits from by selling services to fans and sponsors. The core system is there to be enjoyed and exploited by all sports clubs around the world.

Sport Buoy takes a huge amount of effort to develop, however, so we won’t say no to any donations! If Sport Buoy is an asset to your sporting endeavours, please consider visiting our donations page.

User Features:

• Easy to use and accessible system for searching for local businesses
• Search for businesses alphabetically or by business type
• Download business contact details directly into Outlook, Thunderbird or other email programs in the form of a vCard

Business User Features:

• Dedicated and secure log-in system for controlling the business directory listing
• Listing includes links to website, company logo, contact information and company description
• Company description highly customisable with wide choice of HTML code elements, as allowed by the club in the Sport Buoy Business Directory admin panel.
• Companies can leap-frog their opposition in the business type rankings by paying more for their listing (optional)
• Keep track of the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of their listing, to compare Return On Investment against other advertising options.
• Control over contact information means businesses can ensure that it is kept up to date and correct without relying on webmasters

Sports Club Features

• Simple installation into the existing sports club website – just a couple of lines of code!
• Easily customisable styles to fit with the rest of the club’s site
• New revenue stream for the sports club
• Great incentive to package with existing sponsorship options
• Keeps local business contact information up to date for use in sponsorship marketing campaigns
• Club controls what HTML businesses can use in their layouts – not just which tags but how many of them!
• Club can set number of links within the description on an individual level

1. Club website traffic
2. Club website Google Pagerank
3. Directory visibility on club website – how accessible/well-linked is the directory page?
4. Media profile of club

Clubs need to purchase Directory Credits from the Sport Buoy Credit Shop in order to attribute directory listings to business clients – one credit per client per year. Please allow 48 hours for purchased credits to be allocated to your account. Purchased credits will last indefinitely.

Due to UK money laundering regulations, Sport Buoy cannot accept payments on behalf of sports clubs from businesses: clubs must receive the money directly.

Despite this reliance on the efforts of others, sports clubs frequently struggle to attract fresh blood to participate in the volunteer effort. Sometimes it can be due to comparatively weak ties with the local community, but more often than not a club’s supporters would love to help but just don’t know how they could. This is especially true for many of the critical behind-the-scenes roles such as sponsorship, web design, media, marketing and finance: many of these are skilled roles though, which by volunteering for individuals can add new skills and polish to their CVs – vital in today’s competitive jobs and skills marketplace.

Our Solution: The Volunteer Recruitment Vacancy Board

Sport Buoy’s Volunteer Recruitment Vacancy Board is a simple solution for broadcasting new volunteering opportunities to your fanbase and community. Easily integrated and customised into an existing sports club’s website, the volunteer board acts as a vacancy list into which you can insert details of requests for volunteers for new or existing endeavours. Fields include:

• Vacancy Title
• Committee/Area of Operation
• Skills Required
• Skills Acquired
• Vacancy Description
• Benefits/Perks
• Testimonials
• Commitment/Work Times
• Contact Details

More and more businesses are turning to the Internet to advertise and market their products and services more widely and effectively, but most struggle for visibility in the search rankings or are unable to convert traffic into sales. What your club website can represent to them is a solid link to their website and a strong source of targeted local traffic. But is your site giving them what they need to succeed?

On the other hand, sports clubs sometimes struggle to formulate effective lists of potential sponsors, and once such lists are created the information is often left to go out of date, leaving clubs unable to reach their contacts, market new sponsorship opportunities or even incapable of collecting owed money!

The Sport Buoy Business Directory is the solution to both of these problems. A fully functional and user-friendly online business directory is inserted into your sports club website using only a couple of lines of code, enabling users to search the database alphabetically or by business type.

Businesses can be furnished with usernames and passwords in order to enter and update their own information. This enables them to upload their company logo and other images, write their own copy and maximise the benefit from the space for pre-selling their business. The listing can link to their website to give them more traffic, which will convert to sales more readily due to the local nature of the traffic. The company can also see the cost-per-click (CPC) for the advert in their user screen.

The club benefits from the Sport Buoy Business Directory by being able to sell it direct as a service to local businesses, or use it as an incentive in conjunction with existing sponsorship options. Rankings within the business directory can be determined by the amount paid by the business, with those higher up the pay scale appearing higher in the business type listing. This has the potential to spark bidding wars in verticals with a large number of local companies! Because the businesses obviously need to keep contact information contained in the directory up to date themselves, it creates a large database of valid contact information which clubs can leverage in sponsorship marketing campaigns.