Sports clubs need to protect their data

With registrations for winter sports about to start across Australia in the coming weeks, Sports Community is emphasising the link between well organised and maintained data and club success.

Commenting on the importance of data to community sports clubs, Sports Community Content and Media Manager Joe Novella explains "one of the distinguishing factors of successful local sports clubs is the importance they place on maintaining their data assets: databases, subscription lists, backups and so on.

"For the majority of clubs, data and the integrity and maintenance of data, is well down the priority list, if acknowledged at all.

"And yet nearly all the clubs that we at Sports Community speak to, constantly raise the inability to contact members, gain sponsors, run successful fundraisers or collect payments as key challenges for their clubs.

"In our experience, local sports clubs have failed to recognise the relationship between well organised and maintained data and club success. Volunteers can run around and expend huge amounts of effort trying to chase down enough people to attend a club trivia night, or they could achieve a much better result by having an up-to-date database of members, past members and sponsors to whom they can email invites.

"Data is the key to making it happen."

Sports Community suggest the following 'data health check' for club administrators:

Are you able to find out in the click of a few buttons how many players have yet to pay their membership? How many fully paid-up members you have at your club?

Can you produce a contact list for sponsors of the club?

Do you have a breakdown of the ages of your club's members, their gender and their occupation and any emergency health issues they may have?

Do you have a skills database at your club? That is, do you know how many of your members are doctors, dentists, tradies, and so on?

Do you have a spreadsheet of past players and members of the club?

Do you have a repository of photos and images?

Do you have a database of suppliers to the club? Caterers, equipment providers, etc.?

Can you name the local government members and contacts in the local government departments that deal with local sports clubs?

Why keep and maintain accurate data?

Sports Community emphasise that having well maintained, accurate data gives club a distinct advantage in its ability to:

Keep all members and potential members informed of club events

Attract sponsors

Keep membership details and payments up to date

Hold successful fundraisers

Work with councils, media and government bodies successfully

Apply for grants

Work with your club's governing body

Novella adds "the strength of a club's communication, marketing and promotion efforts depends on the accuracy of the data your club maintains."

Sports Community suggests clubs maintain the following databases or data repositories:

Player details

Payment details

Past players contact

Non playing members and supporters contact

Volunteer skills register

Sports clubs need to protect their data

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