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!