Tuesday, 23 June 2020

Published Tuesday, June 23, 2020 with 2 comments

Accepting Card Payments at The Venue



According to a research over 80 percent of Americans pay with plastic money on a day-to-day basis. The more people get accustomed to online shopping, in-store shopping with contactless cards and digital wallets, the more they eschew cash. More so, with everything going mobile, the payments have also gone mobile. From food truckers to mega events, all need to be able to accept card and digital payments on site.
Understanding mobile payments
Mobile payments allow merchants/event organizers to accept credit card payments anywhere, anytime. Before this technology was introduced, sellers needed fixed terminals with hardwired internet connection to be able to process card payments. Thanks to technology, smartphones now have apps that allow accepting card payments at the point of sale be it a remote site, outdoor event, pop-up venues, or anywhere their business requires them to be.
Why mobile payments?
Simple answer – because your customers want it that way. Customers want to be able to make payments with card on the spot. Mobile payments are convenient, both for the customer and for the seller. The seller does not have the risk and inconvenience of handling cash and later accounting for it, and customers do not need to carry cash or their check-books to make payments. It helps reduce labour, time  and resources for the seller. Most importantly, the seller does not lose a sale because of inability to process on-spot card payment.
InstaTeam’s mobile payments
The InstaTeam point-of-sale application, accepting credit cards on the go has become a breeze. As attendees for a game or event  gather at the venue, the volunteers can accept card payments via the app and start send people in. With larger crowds, there can be several volunteers that accept and process payments, which also helps manage the crowd and avoid chaos at the point of entry. All that the volunteers need is a smartphone with the InstaTeam app. All payment processing, accounting for what number of tickets were sold and by who, and integrating all transactions, all of this is automatically handled by the app. Inventory details, such as how many seats are remaining etc. is also matched, and synchronized via InstaTeam app. Finally, all the payments are directly processed in the linked bank account, such that there’s no room for error. Once the ticket is sold and payment processed, customers get their receipt digitally.
All the credit card information is encrypted as it is swiped. Plus once the payment is processed, the card information is not stored with InstaTeam, not in the app, not in the cloud, nowhere. So, your customers need not worry about their financial information being taken, it is 100 percent secure.
InstaTeam does the heavy lifting for you so you can concentrate on what you do best, play!




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Tuesday, 16 June 2020

Published Tuesday, June 16, 2020 with 9 comments

Listing Youth Sports Tournaments


This time of the year coaches are busy planning the upcoming season’s tournaments. However with Covid-19 things have been delayed. Nevertheless, athletic directors and coaches are planning carefully to get kids back in the game safely. If you have planned ahead for the season, created the event on InstaTeam, scheduled it, you need to list the tournament to make it known to the world. Or, if you are not registering your own tournament, you need to find the right one for your team. In both the scenarios, searching for the right tournament or platform for your own tournament is essential, the key being ‘search’.
If you are having trouble figuring where to list your tournament, here’s a little help. We’ve shortlisted the list of resources for listing your tournament.
To start you need to locate where other tournaments are listed. A Google search of the same would help. Your search will most likely land you either on focused tournaments for your kind of sport or on a general listing of tournaments or on a geography-specific listing of all the sports tournaments in your vicinity, town, state etc. Then there are sports body listings, sports clubs, national level youth sports organizations etc. that have their own tournaments, or provide listings for tournaments.
On searching the Internet
When searching the internet, ‘key words’ is your cue. Use the right keywords for optimum results. For instance, if you are looking for youth soccer tournaments in your state, use the keyword ‘youth soccer tournaments in Oklahoma City 2019’. If you are looking for tournaments sanctioned by some sports body, include the specific keyword or you can also directly go to their website and look for the listings. For instance, try the keyphrase – youth sports tournaments in ESPNWWOS in 2019 – will give you all the listings of IdeaSport Soccer Academy, The Ripken Experience at Walt Disney World Resort, Pop Warner Super Bowl and so on. Meanwhile, you can find the same information by visiting - https://www.espnwwos.com/events/.
Social Media Help
You would either need help with building PR around your tournament (to attract star teams), or around your team (to get selected for star events). In both the cases, you need good marketing to get attention.
Social media is a great place to make a shout and be heard too. Get creative with creating interesting social media campaigns, or appropriately incentivise ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ to get optimize exposure on social media.
InstaTeam Platform
With over fifteen thousand participating teams and 140,000 registered users, InstaTeam is a great platform for getting help with both, joining tournaments and getting teams for your tournament. It’s a great platform to connect with teams and collaborate, for events, tournaments or PR. You can also schedule local events for teams in the vicinity, like a friendly match, meeting for participating in tournament etc.

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Sunday, 14 June 2020

Published Sunday, June 14, 2020 with 8 comments

Post-Match on InstaTeam


Recording post-match data is an important practice. A good coach knows the importance of this data. Each game’s important information like man of the match, individual player ratings, match score, notes etc. helps produce complex team and player analysis reports which then enable coach to understand and focus on key areas. It also helps store memories for each game, helping the club build up on a digital profile.
Upload Media
InstaTeam enables users to store game photos and videos within the app. Users can also upload the photos and videos on your social media accounts directly from InstaTeam app.
Use this opportunity to build the club’s brand and also each individual players brand. Anything that has to go up on social media is digital footprint which will always be traced back to the club and the players. Put up pictures with captions that have names of the club and players mentioned, and a little description of the game the player played.
Here’s an example of how a team puts up captions/stories along with player photos:
Lucas Davis – Man of the match, man of the hour! Lucas, the centre-forward superstar of Westfield Blues, demonstrated exceptional offensive qualities today. Congratulations Lucas on playing a solid match.
A post like this repeated on different social media platforms, gives a wider presence to the player and the team. This in turn helps better search and SEO rankings for both as a brand – the team and the player.
Also, do upload some good pictures from during the match and after the match. Social media likes and shares make for excellent SEO. Individual player photos with a little brief about the match helps build to the digital profile of the club and the players.
Another important upload can be the match score. With this, some teams put the game’s highlights, lessons learned and notes.
With social media likes and shares, the digital profile gets a boost – a good way to augment your brand in the digital space.
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Published Sunday, June 14, 2020 with 4 comments

How To Switch To InstaTeam’s Premium Version


Enjoying using InstaTeam? Want to switch to the premium version? It’s at the tip of your hands, you can easily switch to the premium version from your smart phone or desktop.
Note that coaches (for the entire team), players or parents, anyone can switch to the premium ad-free version.
Here are the steps you need to follow:


  1. Scroll down on the home page or click on the tab ‘Pricing’ on the top right navigation.

  1. The following screen will appear.
This page has simple description of subscription fees for individuals and teams for monthly, bi-monthly and annual subscription.
  1. To understand the additional benefits of InstaTeam app in different modes i.e. free mode versus Individual Ad-Free mode versus Team Ad-free mode, click on ‘Features Comparison’ on the top right-hand-side of the image.


  1. To give you a quick glance at the benefits of going premium, here’s a list:

    1. Team messages and communication is automatically sent as a notification and email to the team. In the SMS bundle, in addition to the above, a text message is also sent to the team. In case the notifications are turned off or there is no internet connectivity for some reason, the team member still receives an alert as a text message, so no important communication is actually missed.
    2. As a premium member, you experience InstaTeam without any ads in the app or email.
    3. InstaTeam allows member-to-member messaging within the app with disclosing phone numbers. In the premium version of InstaTeam, there is an option to turn this feature off.
    4. InstaTeam requires admins to link their account with Stripe or Paypal in order to use the ‘Payments’ feature to collect payments (team fees, events, fundraisers etc.). The premium version allows payments without payments without the need of a gateway or wallet.




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