That’s me hanging up one conference call and starting the next this afternoon.

I am just off a conference call with the National Soccer Coaches’ Association of America Diversity Committee. In addition to some very prominent members of the NSCAA Board and National Staff, the Chairs from the Latin Soccer Coaches Committee, the Ethics Committee, the Black Soccer Coaches Committee, the Native American Soccer Coaches Committee, and the Women’s Committee were all on the call. Our agenda included Mission Statements, Goals and Priorities, and Action Items for the coming year.

The purpose of this blog post is to suggest using the Internet for (1) PRIVATE commitee websites, and (2) PUBLIC marketing campaigns.

PRIVATE PAGES

It’s important to have all members of a committee working together for common goals. I suggest setting up a central administrative resource for each committee – A private, informal website. The website should be administered by one member (preferably the Chair of each committee), and can act as a central resource for collecting and maintaining information.

Importantly, I believe this Internal Site should be an unofficial “online meeting place” where members can feel free to share their voices and ideas without fear that they are violating some sort of official policy. Further, this would be completely separate from the public sites to the members at large, and only be seen by those who are granted access.

Control Who Has Accesss

The administrator can control the privacy settings for their website. This means he/she can either create a password and give it to a small group of people, or pass it along to all members of their particular committee. For example, the Women’s Committee Internal Website (http://www.nscaawc.wordpress.com) is only visible to those 20 people who have the password.

Get Everybody on the Same Page

The Women’s Committee alone has April Heinrichs (former US National Team Coach) in Colorado; Dr. Colleen Hacker (former US National Soccer Team Psychologist) in Europe someplace with the US Field Hockey Team; Sue Ryan (Head Coach at Stonybrook University) in New York; Marcia McDermott (GM of Chicago Women’s Professional Soccer) in Illinois; etc. The list is expansive and includes people with… uhm… pretty busy schedules. I would imagine that the other committees are the same. Creating a central resource where everybody can convene as their schedules permit would be invaluable.

Let’s consider what really gets accomplished on a conference call? It’s usually one hour of talking about what we should be talking about. Hosting a site that isn’t defined by a 60-minute time block may give voice to those who weren’t able to speak up on the telephone. For example, do you think the entire group would have wanted to hear these ramblings after the hour passed us by? (haha, me either!)

Maintain Transparency with Administrators

By giving access to the NSCAA National Staff Liaisons, they can see what our thoughts are, where we’re headed with our initiatives even before we officially submit anything. Lines of communication are always open, so he/she can jump on the website and help guide us within NSCAA guidelines, by simply posting a response.

Eliminate the Email Chain

I’m sure you can relate to my hectic life… I have a full-time job, I design and maintain multiple websites, I am the Chair of the NSCAA Women’s Committee, I’m a member of the NSCAA Education Initiatives Committee, I play on a soccer team, I’m a Dmoz editor, I’m on Regional ODP staff, and I’m a soccer coach. I GET A LOT OF EMAIL, as I’m sure you do too! (And I’m just guessing here, but odds tell me don’t read every attachment either.) By setting up a private group page, we can eliminate the vast amounts of email we all get. Instead we can post thoughts, ideas, topics, and developments right to the central resource. Then we all have a place to come to learn about what’s happening with our individual committees.

I’ve also learned that email addresses change frequently – sometimes we can spend more time managing an email list than writing the email itself. Well, this can effectively eliminate our troubles.

Share Information with Other Committees

Today’s conference call was awesome! I learned about initiatives the other committees are undertaking that I didn’t know about before. If I gave the BSCC or the LASCC Chairs access to my internal site, they might find some ideas/insight that are valuable to their own experiences. The more we can help one another, the greater our amazing NSCAA organization will become.

It’s Free!

Well now that I have your attention…

PUBLIC PAGES

Now let’s move on to the PUBLIC portion of my idea here. The second portion of this blog post is to suggest social media as a means to increase visibility for the NSCAA.

Today on the conference call, the most popular topic among all committees was increasing visibility. I sat on the call and thought to myself, “What is each committee doing now?” I was very impressed that the Latin Soccer Coaches have been instructing courses in Spanish. The Black Soccer Coaches is looking to partner with the BCA (Black Coaches Association), which deals with Basketball Coaches Association, Football and sports administrators — which I think would be really great. The Women’s Committee has developed a coaching course at the Algarve Cup in Portugal.

But the question keeps coming back to me, “How are you spreading the message and increasing visibility?”

Outward Transparency

While it’s important to maintain transparency within an organization, showing the outside world what you’re all about will help gain credibility and interest. And it should be made clear from the get-go, that the key to working and interacting in the social media/Internet arena is honesty. It’s a simple and seemingly obvious tactic. But, people just don’t like it when companies hide, lie, or pretend to be something they are not.

Organic Searches

The NSCAA has done a great job providing a space for each committee online. We each host a sub-page of the NSCAA.com homepage, located at http://nscaa.com/soccercommunity.php. I believe these sites are perfect for to maintain and keep as our central resource. Driving more viewers to our individual websites will help grow recognition for our individual communities, but will importantly help increase awareness on a grand scale for the NSCAA.

“Organic search” refers to traffic or search results that are a product of a Search Engine’s algorithm, rather than paid advertisements. Knowing that the NSCAA is a non-profit organization with little financial wherewithal to launch a national advertising campaign, I’ve done my best to optimize the NSCAA Women’s Committee website for search engines and write content that drives organic searches for coaches of women. (I’m working on getting an analytics package for my site right now… More to follow on that.)

This is certainly important, but I’d venture to say most of the people on our call today don’t have a particular interest in writing content explicitly for search engine optimization. So, there are many more ways we can drive hits (hence spreading the message and increasing visibility) that we’re not fully exploring.

Social Media Marketing

The good old days are gone – the Google search boom was fun, but the Internet is huge and search isn’t the only game in town. Social media is basically democratization of information, and it allows people to change from simply being content readers to publishers. It’s based on conversations between authors, people, and peers.

From F the Big 3.com: The web has changed the way people communicate, and it is changing the way companies communicate with current and future customers. Your “message” is no longer in your hands – and truth be told, it never really was. There are millions of blogs being created every week, each one searchable by search engines. Anyone – and everyone – can now be a self-published critic of anything – and everything. And of course it’s not just blogs anymore. It’s sites like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and a thousand others.

The NSCAA can take full advantage of this “information revolution” by offering a social networking space, and I think we should start within each group in the Diversity Committee – the LASCA, BSCA, WC, etc. I think this is a good place to start because each group has a particular voice/point of view, and a working database of interested/involved people to start with. It’s also a manageable group to start. We can use the “wisdom of crowds” to collaborate and develop silos of coaching information on the web relevant to our subcommittees.

Build Geographic Communities

Today on the conference call, each Committee Chair said that he/she is interested in localizing efforts and creating regional groups. To address this, the blogs can be broken into sub-sections, as many as you want (yes, that could be one in each state!). You can give specific permissions to an admin for each category. Then we could really grow the local communities, giving them a more tangible place to convene online, and also interact under the umbrella of the greater national organization.

Increase Membership

Back to the #1 goal. All these efforts are cost-effective (read: free+man-power+time) ways to increase visibility and attract members to the NSCAA and its subcommittees. Upon review of this post, I feel like this 3,000 word essay is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of marketing initiatives the NSCAA can undertake in the coming year. I look forward to writing more!

Tagged as: diversity, NSCAA, soccer coach, Technology