For the 2022 season, Red River Infinity Volleyball chose Sporfie for their live streaming and fundraising, allowing them to stream and share home games, practices, away games and tournaments–all at no cost to their athletes and their families. Plus, it introduced a new way for them to fundraise and connect with the businesses in their local community.
The Sporfie team chatted with Alyssa LaFlamme, Director of Operations, to hear her thoughts on how their first year went. The content below was transcribed directly from a video call on August 31, 2022.
We're really big within our club about the girls giving back to the community. The Sporfie fundraising process was a nice way for the athletes to get out into the community, put a face to the name, and actually talk to businesses about the club and their team, instead of just saying, “here's what I'm selling, and you should buy some.”
Our board thinks that this a great opportunity to fundraise for the club. They were a little unsure about it last year, something so new, but now that we've gone through it with one season, and they've gotten to see how it works, they love it and want to use it going forward. Plus, some of them were actually able to utilize the video service and watch their own athletes.
I think we're really going to condense our fundraising options and make Sporfie one of our main options just because it's a win win–the athletes get fundraising credit, but also it's a huge thing for the club from the video perspective.
As an admin, it's really nice that you can go into the system and see which athlete an ad sale is tied to, because everybody gets their own link. For fundraising tracking purposes, it was huge that we didn’t need to try and track down who sold what ad. Plus, everything updates in pretty much real-time.
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A lot of us coaches for the older girls really utilized Sporfie as a way to watch film with the players.
At a two day tournament this season, I had my girls come down to the lobby one evening, and we kind of just watched. I had gone through the film and picked some different sections to watch, and I clipped some highlights myself of some things that went well and some areas that we could improve on.
These girls are just such visual learners. They can watch a TikTok 10 times and then they can do it. But if you try to tell them how to do it, they don't always get it. Being able to see themselves in film using the highlight clipping made a big difference for them. They really liked that aspect.
I know the team that I worked with loved being able to go back and watch what they were doing and then have you walk them through it while they can watch it.
Our parents thought it was phenomenal that the streaming was free to them, especially because they could also share it with grandparents or aunts and uncles or whoever they wanted without them having to pay to set up an account.
I know there are some different streaming services that charge a subscription for the day or season, but the fact that Sporfie was free was huge, and I think that definitely increased the number of viewers we had.
And the quality of it–in the past we've had some parents, like last year during COVID, that had to pay to watch, so they would sit in a hotel room and put it up on a TV, but the quality wasn't there.
It was really easy for our parents and everybody else to navigate and be able to go back and rewatch with good quality and be able to clip highlights after was, I don't know, they thought it was really worth it.
[About the setup process:] I know the first time they were all nervous about it. After they did it once, all of the parents were like, this is super easy. It doesn't take virtually any time to set up.They could sit down for 10 minutes the night before a tournament and set up all their matches for the next day.
It's very user friendly. It's pretty self-explanatory. It takes virtually no time to set up a game.
The kids loved it. I mean everyone from the 12’s to 18’s. Obviously the older girls appreciate it a little bit more, because some of them are looking at playing in college or being able to play beyond high school.
I know Ethan, our volleyball recruiting coordinator, liked that he could tell some of the girls to go in and clip some highlights of themselves if they weren't already in there, giving them the option to rewatch if they wanted.
The girls love clipping highlights, and even all the way down to 12 year olds, just being able to clip their own highlights to share with friends or family was huge for them.
And now if they want to use that film to help them get recruited, that's a big piece for them. And they don't have to try to have mom or dad record it, because we already have it set up for them.
When we talked to some of the businesses [that purchased an ad spot], they liked that, compared with other marketing, this was an affordable option that lasts for the whole year–it's not just a one time thing for one tournament or only one team.
Plus we have 20 teams, so you're not just marketing to one team and the people watching them, your ads are seen clubwide. People had grandparents watching from Florida who were there for the winter. You're reaching a wider base of people that you might not typically reach.
Once we had set it up, it was nice to be able to show businesses what the stream looked like or send them a highlight clip and say here's what it looks like, like, here's an actual highlight. I know some of us used it to show them, here's what the logo looks like in the corner, here's what like a highlight looks like and here's the quality of the video, so they could see exactly what their ad would look like.
