Over the past year, organizations have been utilizing GMTM to better engage with athletes and to streamline their talent pathways. These organizations include many National Governing Bodies, like USA Bobsled & Skeleton, USA Football, and Climbing Canada, to name a few.
GMTM's goal is to work with teams to ensure the process for athletes, from start to finish, is clear and easy to follow. Communication with athletes is an extremely important area that organizations are continuously trying to improve upon. Mapping out clear objectives, incentives and goals, helps athletes better navigate and understand the entire process of an organization's talent pathway.
Keep reading to learn more about best practices GMTM has identified that help organizations successfully engage and grow their communities more than ever before.
Getting Started
One of the most important steps to ensuring success is to start by establishing a clear goal. Communication and alignment on goals is the best way to ensure all activities, efforts and resources are being maximized and focused on the right priorities. What is your overall long term goal? What are short term campaigns with measurable and timely goals that can help you reach your long term goal?
Based on your overall goal, identify the first campaign to set you up on the path for success. Is this a campaign to bring athletes into your network on GMTM? If so, this first campaign will be the stepping stone used to bring athletes into your community. Establish clear incentives and descriptions for athletes’ participation. Helping athletes to understand the benefits of joining your network on GMTM will be beneficial in encouraging participation.
Creating strong, storytelling and branding assets will help with setting up your community on GMTM and ensuring that athletes, coaches and members all feel part of a unique, custom experience. These elements will add credibility, and a consistency that will ensure athletes know they are joining your community where they will find value, connection and resources specific to their needs.
Invite Your Network
After launching your network and initial campaign on GMTM, the next step is to begin inviting your current database of athletes and any existing lists of athletes to join your network on GMTM. Inviting your network to participate in your campaign(s) will give you the opportunity to create the network intended for streamlining future communication. Athletes create free profiles on GMTM, which then enables your organization to share resources, information and other materials with them year-round.
Inviting your existing athletes, coaches, and other audiences to join your network on GMTM will help create the sense of community as you grow your network and bring in new visitors. Starting with your existing audiences will help encourage activity, and set the foundation for a community that will be appealing for new members to join.
Get Social
Promote your campaigns and organization network on social media, via email blasts, press releases and other avenues. Promotion of your campaigns and network will help your current members and athletes know where to find you and how to stay involved throughout their entire athletic career journey.
Announcing your community through other channels will help drive your current audiences to join your network on GMTM. Once on GMTM, organizations have access to an area called Front Office, where you can monitor engagement analytics, participation, leaderboards, manage content and media, and so much more. Organizations have the ability to gather more information about their audiences through GMTM features.
Another great way to help communicate your presence on GMTM is by adding the link to your network and any campaigns on your official team website. Athletes and parents who are looking for information on your website will be able to navigate to your network on GMTM to get connected and stay informed.
It’s also helpful to encourage your internal stakeholders and your external partners to share information about your network and campaigns on GMTM with their followers. Driving traffic and raising awareness of your community will help ensure you get all of your current athletes and coaches into one place, while also bringing in new talent you may not have fully captured before.
Find & Engage New Talent
As your community begins to grow through your existing audience and new followers, you can also begin tapping into the thousands of active monthly users who are currently on GMTM. You can search through GMTM to find new athletes, and coaches. You can browse through film on the platform to see if there are talented athletes you want to personally connect with and invite to join your network.
Throughout GMTM, you will be able to see athletes, coaches and other organizations getting active on the platform. An organization can begin tapping into the network more and more by searching through the platform, scrolling through the news feed, building lists, connecting with athletes, watching film, and interacting through personal messages and mass messages and personalized invites.
Grow Your Community
Communities are living and breathing networks. They require maintenance and engagement to stay healthy and thriving. A best practice on GMTM to ensure your community retains members and continues to grow, is to stay active by sharing updates, resources, and educational materials. Interacting with individual members and communicating updates to the network, will help the members stay involved and active.
Lastly, don’t forget to share results and successes with your community. Athletes, coaches, and members of your community will love to hear from you about the outcomes of campaigns and events. Reporting results will help you to continue to build on momentum. This can be as simple as posting leaderboards so that athletes can see where they rank in relation to other athletes. This can also create a sense of competition amongst your network.
To learn more about organizations who are building communities on GMTM or to learn how to begin building a network for your organization, check out our 2022 year-end recap and be sure to connect with our team.
