justin's Blog
TOC News
Welcome back TheFieldJobs.com readers!One of the monthly projects that I work on is the Tennis On Campus News. The TOC News is an electronic newsletter that wwe distribute to keep interested parties up-to-date on the Tennis On Campus program. We include information on upcoming events, results from past events, special discount offers from our partners at Tennis Warehouse, coaching/training tips, stories about Tennis On Campus programs and participants, resources that our program sites can use – the list goes on.
When I first started my position, the TOC News was a quarterly publication. We created a four-page PDF with all of our information and distributed it to a small number of e-mail addresses. I was singularly in charge of securing the content – this meant conducting interviews with program participants and writing stories myself. Since that time, the TOC News has grown in size, scope, and importance. It is now released every month, it’s distributed as an html e-mail, all of our articles are housed on TennisOnCampus.com, and the distribution list is considerably larger. The maturation of the TOC News has been a fun process to have been a part of – as the program has grown, so have our communication methods.
This month, I’m actually preparing two editions for April. One will go out in the first few days and the other will go out during the second day of the 2009 USTA National Campus Championship. In the first one, we’ll be including articles promoting the USTA National Campus Championship, a discount on Wilson bags from Tennis Warehouse, introduce our Blog Team for the USTA National Campus Championship (more on that fun project later), announce our first ever Tennis On Campus Club and Leader of the Year awards, highlight twin sisters that played USTA Jr. Team Tennis growing up and are now on the club tennis team at Western Washington University, and finally a blurb on the results from all 16 of our USTA Campus Championship – Section Events.
The TOC News slated to be released during the championship will be shorter, and will mainly draw attention to the USTA National Campus Championship page on TennisOnCampus.com – where people can see the latest results, news, and pictures from the tournament as it happens! It will also include a link to our blog team’s page and another discount from Tennis Warehouse.
I mentioned that I used to have to generate all of the content for the TOC News. Well, I kind of still do, but in a very different way. Instead of being hands on, we’ve hired a writer who does all of the leg work of reaching out to teams/individuals who have interesting stories surrounding the Tennis On Campus program. This has freed up a lot of valuable time for me to dedicate to other aspects of the program and has allowed us to generate a lot more stories than we would’ve been able to otherwise. Our writer is awesome and knows the ins and outs of the program, which is vital. I feed her the story leads and communicate with her throughout the process.
The TOC News has also allowed me another opportunity to dip my toe in the waters of more advanced technology and marketing techniques. I work closely with our membership department (who creates and manages the e-mail process) and have been learning a ton about e-mail marketing. The USTA as a whole is also looking to get a little more creative in this area. Luckily, I like pushing the envelope with things like this and exploring possibilities that can help grow our distribution list, the Tennis On Campus program, and the sport of tennis. The TOC program is really a perfect arena in which to test a lot of these experimental programs and processes. The forward to a friend functionality is the first area that we’ll be looking at getting involved with, but then after that there has been some talk regarding social networking functionality in conjunction with the TOC News. That could be mad fun and very interesting. Stay tuned for that.
If you’re curious about the Tennis On Campus News, you can sign-up to receive it here.
Until next time, are you playing TheField?
Justin
Posted: Mar 16, 2009