The Group Chat Is Not a Communications Strategy
Why community sport organisations need to rethink how they talk to the participants who show up every week.
The game finished an hour ago. Someone scored a last-minute winner. There are photos. There are results. There are details about next week's fixture that people need to know.
And right now, your club's communication plan is fragmented: fixtures go in the WhatsApp group, results go on the website that few people check, and you wait for the parent who calls because they missed the message entirely.Sound familiar?
Your participants are in one place. Your messages aren’t.
The data shows that 70% of the world's population is now on mobile phones. And, sport is one of the most-followed categories on these devices. When something happens, sports enthusiasts find out through a notification, a feed, or an alert pushed directly to their screen, and with push notifications seeing 98% open rates compared to 18% for email, it's clear that the medium matters.
Professional clubs, national leagues, and major sporting brands have already moved well beyond the email blast. They send personalised push notifications. NRL texts match reminders. The communication feels direct because it is.
On the other hand, community sport administrators are still communicating across a broken network of email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS, none of it connected to the platform where participants are already registered and competitions are already managed. That's according to Pollinate research, and it names the real problem.
It isn't just that clubs are using the wrong tools. It's that the place sport is administered and the place sport is communicated have always been two separate worlds.
And when communication is fragmented, the burden falls on the people least equipped to carry it: the volunteer who's already spent their Saturday running a game.
What your participants want
The research is consistent. People want communications that are relevant, timely, and easy to act on.
They want to know the result. They want to know when the training is. They want to be welcomed at the start of the season by the people who run the thing they've paid to be part of.
They want the club to send them what actually matters to them and nothing that doesn't. Increasingly, they expect personalisation, too. Research shows 68% of sports fans say personalisation significantly increases their satisfaction with an organisation. A generic blast to the entire club about an under-10s fixture doesn't land the same way as a message that comes directly to them, about the team they're actually part of.
Communication is retention
Every season, sporting organisations spend time and money getting participants through the door. Registration campaigns. Promotions. Seasonal pricing. And then, once someone's registered, communication often drops off. The assumption is that they signed up so they know where to find all the details.
But the clubs that retain members year after year don't leave communication to chance. They treat it as part of the relationship. They make participants feel seen and connected throughout the season, not just at sign-up. And when it comes time to re-register, the decision is easy, because the experience felt worth coming back to.
Communication isn't separate from the experience of being in a club. It is part of the experience. The message you send the day after a big win, the welcome at the start of the season, the fixture reminder that arrives before someone has to chase it down. Those moments add up.
Where communication is heading
The clubs that are ahead of the curve have stopped treating communication like an admin task. They're thinking about who needs to know what, and when, and how to reach them without every message competing with a group chat full of noise.
The shift isn't complicated. It starts with asking: where are my participants already? Then you meet them there: with the right message, for the right people, tied to the competition they're actually part of.
That's what PlayHQ Posts was built to do. From a single place inside the platform where your competition is already managed, club, association, and governing body admins can write an update and send it straight to their participants, via a push notification in the app, an email, or on their organisation’s public site. Targeting by role, team, grade, or season means a fixture change reaches the right age group, a season welcome goes to every new registrant, and a rule update lands with officials and coaches rather than everyone's inbox.
The data is early, but the signal is clear: clubs are already streamlining the way they communicate. Admins are using it for the full range of things they've always needed to communicate: announcements, event updates, reminders, schedule changes, registration information, and general news. The breadth of use cases reflects something simple: clubs have a lot to say, and they've always had the content. They just needed a better way to send it. And now they can, all through one platform.
The response from admins has been clear, too:
"It's really good, a game changer for communicating short messages." - President, Bankstown Sports Junior Cricket Club
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