You can use your website to publish news, and results so that members know what is happening in your club, but to really keep in touch you may need to pro-actively contact members rather than just relying on the website.  This is where our emailer tool comes in.

One of the features of a hitssports websites is a tool to allow you to email your members.  Keeping in touch with your membership is important so we’ve tried to build in features that allow you to contact the members you need to, how you need to.

The emailer tool, is found under the communications heading in the admin area.  It allows you to compose an html formatted email, which means you can add colours, fonts, and layout to your email.  You can also personalise the email each person receives by addressing the email personally, in a similar way to how you would use a “mail merge” in an office application.

You can then select who receives the email.  The choices are as follows.

• All current members - email goes to all members registered on the system.
• All club officials - Email will be sent to all those people marked as club officials
• Members selected for a specific fixture - if the details about a fixture have changed you might want to select to email all those who have been selected to play.
• Squad / or specific members - This option allows you to send an email to members in a specific squad (or squads), you can also choose specific members who you would like to send the email.

These features cover most of the common ways that sports club need to communicate with their membership.  One additional feature to launch shortly will allow you to send an email to all members who are not currently selected for a fixture on a given date, but have marked themselves as available.  This is intended to aid in the scenario when players drop out of teams at short notice and replacements are required, rather than frantically phoning round possible replacements this will automatically contact all possible replacements.

We are also working on an SMS text messaging feature, which will provide all the same features as the emailer, however rather than sending emails it will send text messages to members who have registered their mobile phone.