On my daily afternoon walk with my dog, Rufus, we came across this empty lot with one tree on it. Taped to the tree was a letter from the City of Englewood claiming the RESIDENT was in violation of some ordinance or other that regulates grass longer than 8 inches. (The grass wasn’t, we are coming out of a long period of no rain, but that is another post entirely!)
If you ask the City, they will have claimed that the message was duly delivered to the property in accordance with the statute governing the delivery of notices, blah, blah, blah… But, the reality is it is a letter taped to a TREE! Any reasonable person would quickly come to the conclusion that the notice was not really delivered to the person intended to receive it.
How does this matter to a soccer tournament? Quite simply, the rules of message delivery have changed and continues to change. Pre-Internet, we had the US Postal Service and Ma Bell. Yesterday, we had email. But tomorrow, email will become as unreliable as taping a letter to a tree. You can send the email, but there is is an ever-increasing chance the recipient won’t get it. Coaches change emails, set spam-filters way too-high, get temporary emails just for the tournaments, don’t pick up email anymore, etc. And, with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, email is becoming less and less relevant or wanted except as a notification message.
Our Advice: Don’t tape letters to trees with your email notices. If you send out a notice that asks people to reply or do something, track compliance. Most people will act within hours of being asked to do something simple via email. Then, for those that don’t, start your follow-up process, which might be another email, a phone call, etc. (The TourneyCentral.com sites are being outfitted with some really cool alternative systems.. stay tuned!) You don’t need to over-communicate with your guest teams by sending out volumes of email, just the right communication at the right time. And, delivered to the right tree… I mean, person.