Manage a Pool Archives | Page 2 of 2

Hockey Pool Fundraiser

October 15, 2015 by hpadmin

Operating a minor hockey team or organization is becoming increasingly expensive at all levels, and companies aren’t throwing around sponsorship dollars as readily as they have in the past, so teams have to come up with other ways to help ease the financial burden on the players families. There are a whole host of different fundraising opportunities available out there, and we offer one that is both fun for all involved, and ties in nicely, since you’re already dealing with a group of people that are into hockey.

Why Run a Hockey Pool Fundraiser?

Hockey Pools are both easy to manage, and fun for everyone involved. You’re a hockey team or organization, and your fundraiser is centered around hockey, so it’s a natural fit. Our Loser Hockey Pool is the most popular, but we do have other options. Almost all of the legwork is prior to the pool starting, sending out invites and collecting entry fees (which you can track on the site). Once the pool has started, there really isn’t much to do until the pool is over and you have to make the payout.

It can increase interest in the on ice performance of the team/organization, which can also help at the gate, for those that charge admission. Post a link to the pool and sign up information on your team website, and a link to your team website on your pool home page.

Things to Consider

What type of prize structure will you use? A fixed pot or a split pot? A fixed pot is a set amount that isn’t dependent on the number of entries. For example, you set your prize at $1000, and it doesn’t matter how many entries you have, the winner earns $1000. The funds raised will be anything above that $1000. A split pot (usually set at 50/50) is a little different as the prize is set based on the number of entries, with half going to the team or organization and half going to the winner of the pool.

Some teams will set minimum entry numbers for each player to ensure a minimum number of entries, so you can advertise a minimum prize, if you’re using the split pot structure.

Is it legal in your area? Will you need a gaming licence to run your pool? If you’re running a large hockey pool for an entire organization, we suggest you explore the options to find out the details of what is and isn’t allowed. There can be very specific rules about prize structure involved. I know some areas specify you must have a fixed prize pool, so your prize is a set amount, and is not dependent on the number of entries.

Ideas for Success

Offer some sort incentive to team/player that ‘sells’ the most entries. You’re dealing with competitive people, and an incentive can really drive up numbers. If there’s a major junior hockey team in your area, tickets to a game can be a great options.

Set your pool to allow for multiple incorrect selections before elimination to keep people in and engaged for a longer period of time. Hockey is much more ‘random’ game to game than football, so Survivor/Eliminator style hockey pools tend to be shorter than football ones.

An alternative to multiple lives/strikes is to run multiple pools per season – one beginning in October, and another beginning in January. If you advertise this when setting up the 1st pool, you’ll already have people expecting it. You can even set up both at the same time, and collect for both at the same time if you wish. We offer a discount on your 2nd pool in a season, which is more money for your team or organization.

While this isn’t really anything you can do or encourage, occasionally people that win will donate a portion of winnings back to the organization. If it ever does happen, be sure to publicly thank the person that did so.

Send us a message if you’d like to know more about setting up a hockey pool fundraiser on HostedPools.com! Ask us about a discount on multiple pools in the same season.

Office Pool Payout

August 24, 2015 by hpadmin

The most important aspect of running a successful pool is setting your entry fee and payout structure, and ensuring everyone’s money is accounted for and in good hands. If people don’t trust you, they aren’t going to hand over their money, it doesn’t matter how great your set up is, so be transparent in everything you do. Setting your entry fees and your payouts is easy and here is some information to guide you:

Managing Office Pool Money

In our opinion the best thing to do if you’re going to be handling money for an office pool is set up a separate account and require 2 signatures, especially if your prize pool is going to be a significant amount of money. Money generally only comes out once a year, so requiring 2 people to withdraw money isn’t a big deal to ensure that piece of mind for your poolies. This will probably be overkill for a number of pools, but we’d still suggest keeping a separate account in your personal banking to deal with it if it’s any amount over $500. Anything under that and just keep solid records so you know what you have that belongs to your pools (or throw it in some sort of safe). There are also services online now that will handle payments for fantasy leagues and office pools (e.g. LeagueSafe)

Office Pool Entry Fees

The biggest key to setting your entry fee is knowing what type of person is going to be in your pool. If it’s reasonably low, you’re probably looking for more casual fans and a potentially larger pool, while if it’s at the higher end, you’re most likely running a smaller pool of more serious participants. Pretty much any pool we run is a minimum of $10, which is less than a meal at most restaurants. For any office pool that lasts an entire season for everyone involved, we lean towards $20-$25 as that usually works out to about a dollar per week. For football pools (pick’em) where there is also a weekly prize, we generally go with $2 to $5 per week, with an extra $20 to $50 each for the overall prize. That works out to about $55 for the season on the low end, and closer to $135 at the high end. For fantasy leagues, we like something between $25 and $100 per person, which usually keeps people from just letting their team slide after a few early season losses. Note that these are guidelines for a more casual entrant. There will obviously be some pools that play for more significant amounts of money.

Office Pool Payout

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to paying out any fantasy league or office pool. First, you have the “winner take all” approach, where there is a sole winner, who wins the entire prize pot. The second spreads out the prize pool over a number of positions and/or ‘bonus’ prizes with a gradual decline in value for each position. Different methods work for different types/sizes of pools:

Fantasy Leagues:

As these are usually smaller in size with 8-16 participants, the “winner take all” approach works well here. Some leagues will distinguish between regular season and playoff champions and have a prize for each.

Eliminator/Survivor Pools

Obviously these types of office pools are geared specifically towards “winner take all”, but there are usually opportunities for splitting once you get down to the end if the pool is large enough. When it comes to splits, we always like to leave a significant amount still on the table to play for, and any split must be agreed to by all remaining participants prior to being approved by the pool manager.

Season Long Pick’em/Box/Player Pools

These types of pools tend to be the ones where multiple payout spots work best, especially if your pool is more than just a few participants. Anything over 10-15, and you should start adding payout positions. Our rule of thumb is roughly one payout spot for every 10 to 15 entries, so a pool with 50 entries would pay out 4 or 5 positions. Unless your pool is very large (well over 100 entries), we suggest making the first prize as close to 50% of the prize pool as possible, and lean towards going further above 50% the smaller the pool.

Bonus Prizes

In some season long pools, it sometimes makes sense to have ‘bonus’ prizes, that aren’t determined by overall score at the end of the season. The most common is to reward a first half or second half winner. A second half prize can be a good way to keep people interested, even if they have a slow start in the overall standings. Another interesting twist is to payout the person finishing last with their money back, with the caveat that they have to have made all of their picks in order to ‘win’ the prize. We generally suggest avoiding bonus prizes unless the pool has a significant number of entries (at least 50).

There is no right or wrong way to set up your payout, just be sure to lay it out clearly for participants prior to the pool starting to avoid any complications during the season. When setting your payout, don’t forget to account for any fees you have to pay out to manage the pool, such as a site fee, or banking fees so you don’t end up out of pocket.

Grow Your Office Pool

August 19, 2015 by hpadmin

Once you have started an office pool and you have the first season (or several seasons) as a pool manager under your belt and things have gone smoothly, it’s time to start seriously thinking about growing your pool. With more entries comes better competition, and what most people are interested in – bigger payouts. This also potentially leads to more time commitment and more responsibility for you. Thankfully with HostedPools, that’s generally not the case.

Here are a few of the key things to consider when growing your office pool:

1. Know What You Can Handle

You already have at least a season managing an office pool under your belt, so you should have a solid idea of the time commitment required at different parts of the season. That should give you a reasonable idea of how much more time and effort you can afford to devote to making your league operate well with an increase in entries. Thankfully, HostedPools is here to help you by handle updating stats for you, so most of the availability is required in the set up stages, sending invites and gathering entries and taking care of financials.

2. Set Realistic Goals

Once you’ve decided how many more teams you can reasonable handle, be sure to set a goal for you to strive towards. Just saying you want to grow your league isn’t enough. Set a specific number of entries to work towards that you think is attainable. You will be more focused in getting there if you have a realistic number in mind.

3. Existing Members

The key to growing an office pool, is keeping your existing entrants satisfied. It’s much easier to keep a ‘customer’ than it is to get a new one. If your existing participants enjoy your pool, they are also more likely to spread the word to their friends, and word of mouth is easily one of the best forms of ‘marketing’ your pool. They’re also apt to create multiple teams on their own to increase their chances as your pool gets larger. This is most often the case in survival/elimination type pools, so people can hedge their bets to take a shot at a big prize.

4. Selling Your Pool

What’s the best part about your league? Is it the high payout for first place, the multitude of payout spots, the competition or the daily interaction and smack talk with the other entrants? Is your league ultra-competitive or more casual? Knowing what potential poolies are looking for makes it a lot easier for you to ‘sell’ participating in your pool to them. As we mentioned in our start an office pool post, make the invitations as personable as possible. Mass messages don’t tend to work nearly as well.

5. Make It Easy

Create an email, PDF or a Google Doc of step by step instructions for how to join your pool, for both yourself and your existing entrants to use as a reference when recruiting new entrants. Be sure to be clear and concise, so your potential new entrants understand what to do. It’s always helpful when doing something new to have an easy to follow reference if you get stuck or confused by something. We have a one step link in our invites to make it easier to acquire new entrants.

6. Social Networking

Why not set up a fan page or group on Facebook so people can follow your pool, or post on Twitter using your pool name as a hashtag? It’s a good way to spread the word about your pool, and very easy for your participants to invite their friends to follow along. Be sure everyone is cool with their name being posted as a courtesy.

Do you have any other great tips for growing an office pool? (What has worked for you? What hasn’t?) Share them in the comments!

Start an Office Pool

August 9, 2015 by hpadmin

If you’ve ever thought about starting an office sports pool, we’re more than happy to help whether you use our service or not. We’ll walk you through the steps necessary to start an office pool that will be successful from the beginning. We have decades of experience managing office pools and fantasy sports leagues, and want to share some of what we’ve learned with you. A number of the things you’ll need to consider can be handled and managed on HostedPools.

1) Pick Your Sport/Format

If you’re thinking about starting an office pool, you likely already have a good idea of what sport you want to focus on, but every sport or major event tends to have several different format options for you to choose from. Some will take much more effort than others, so choose wisely. Take a look at the different office pool formats we have available and choose your favourite.

2) Make a List of Possible Entrants

Come up with a list of people or groups you know that may be interested in participating in your pool. If it’s a true office pool, confine it to those in your actual office or department. If not, that may still be a good group to start with. If you’re in other fantasy leagues or office pools, invite some of the participants if you know them. If you aren’t the manager/commish of that pool/league, you should ask permission before spamming their email list, asking people to join your pool. There are a bunch of other groups of people (teammates, classmates, etc.) that would be good to ask, and definitely don’t overlook the women. You may be surprised at the number of women that are in, or manage football pools on our site, including several winners.

3) Decide Entry Fee & Payout Structure

Once you’ve come up with your list of potential entrants, it’s time to think about your entry fee and your prize structure (assuming it’s not a Survivor/Winner take all type pool). As far as entry fee goes, it will depend on your entrants. The lower the entry fee, the more casual a fan/participant you’ll attract. The higher the entry fee, and the higher the overall payout ends up, the more serious player you’ll draw.

If your pool is starting small, your best bet is likely to make it a winner take all, or at most payout 2 positions. As your pool grows, you’ll want to pay out more prizes, and make the top prize a smaller percentage of the overall pie. Our rule of thumb for the pools we run is payout one spot for every 10 entrants in the pool, with the top prize being somewhere around 50% of the prize pool.

4) Decide Rules

All of the office pools on HostedPools.com have some pre-defined rules in place, but you do have some options, including multiple lives/strikes, as well as the type of defaults to use. Make sure your rules are targeted to your the type of entrants you listed and clearly communicated to them. It makes life as a pool manager a whole lot easier when you aren’t repeatedly answering the same questions.

5) Send Invitations

Once you have all of the details of your office pool set, it’s time to start filling up your pool. Go back to your list from step 2, and reach out to each one of them to invite them to join your new office pool. You can do the group email thing, but people are more likely to respond more positively to a more personal or individualized approach. HostedPools does have the ability to send out emails directly from your pool, both to the previous year’s entrants, or by submitted email addresses. We’ll take a look down the road at some strategies for growing your pool once it’s set up.

6) Keep Records

It’s very important to be transparent and keep meticulous records regarding your office pool. Keeping track of payments both coming in and going out, as well as any fees that will come out of the overall payout. Some of the fees you may have to consider are bank fees (if you set up a separate account, accepting paypal payments or sending Email Money Transfers to the winners) and the site hosting fee. Be sure to account for these in your payout structure, so you don’t find yourself out money for running your pool.

Also, for future years, keep track of who entered your pool, and how to contact them the following season. HostedPools offers both payment tracking for entries, as well as a listing of all of your entrants, which you can copy to a spreadsheet for your own records.

This should get you on your way to managing your office sports pool. We will be posting a handy checklist to aid you in the near future. Meanwhile, use ‘PICKOLOGY’ as your coupon code for a 10% discount on your first HostedPools Office Pool!

Create Your Office Pool

Why Run a Hockey Pool Fundraiser?

Things to Consider

Ideas for Success

Managing Office Pool Money

Office Pool Entry Fees

Office Pool Payout

1) Pick Your Sport/Format

2) Make a List of Possible Entrants

3) Decide Entry Fee & Payout Structure

4) Decide Rules

5) Send Invitations

6) Keep Records

About Pickology

Tags

Let’s Get Social