Sport Buoy

The Sport Buoy Sponsorship Administration Suite is here to help centralise your sports club sponsorship information. Track sales, share notes, store contacts and hit your targets with this secure online administration tool.

Welcome to Sport Buoy!

After 9 months of development, testing, trialling and triumphing, the attention of the Sport Buoy team is turning from the web application towards the top-level site. Over the next month this WordPress blog will be slowly transformed into our main marketing front-end, so please bear with us while we tidy up the loose ends.

With the end of the 2008/2009 season comes a great deal of effort on the part of sports clubs as they deal with the consequences of the last turbulent year and try to organise themselves for the next campaign, and Sport Buoy is no different. We’re trialling how the system copes with year-ends and new seasons at the moment too, as well as continuing other support work with our client clubs, so don’t expect too many development announcements for the next couple of months. After the dust has settled we’ll be looking to add a few more clubs to our system trial – still in an alpha state – with the eventual aim being to have a complete beta available for more general use by December 2009.

If you are interested in the capabilities and benefits which Sport Buoy can bring to your sports club, please contact us via email at info@sportbuoy.com.

Yours sincerely,

The Sport Buoy Development Team

Volunteers are the lifeblood of most sports clubs. Manning the gates, taking care of the grounds, helping with fund-raising and a whole host of other a sports club’s tasks are carried out by loyal supporters who are more than happy to help out for free. The more assistance from volunteers that a club receives off the pitch, the more likely that its’ players will succeed on the pitch.

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

The Sport Buoy Business Directory enables you to offer businesses what they need to succeed online: quality advertising, quality links and quality traffic.

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.