September 7th, 2010
It takes many people to pull off a season of sports successfully.
It is ironic that, often in my observation, the better the contribution to that successful sports season the less recognition that contribution gets.
For example; the first four years my son was in soccer all of the soccer fields he played on were mud pits by the last half of the season because we live in the rainy pacific northwest. At some point the fields mostly seems to stay relatively mud free through most or all of each season. The value of this to all concerned was huge. Despite this value the contribution was not noticed at a conscious level and it certainly got no recognition or thanks.
The point is that while we may “get away” with not giving recognition for contributions, both the team spirit and the likelihood that the contribution will continue are much less without recognition in my experience.
At Bonzi we know our role and our contribution in most of the sports organizations we serve and only need one kind of recognition; that our teams continue to use our software every year. Sure, we like and want other forms of recognition but we really only need and hope for continued use of the software. Continued use really says it all to us.
Consider taking a look around at all that it takes to run a successful sports season and making that extra effort if you don’t already to acknowledge and recognize the wide variety of contributions that made the season possible. I have been impressed by some of the coaches and parents at the season end pizza parties that lightly but thoroughly cover many and maybe even most of the contributions, large and small, that made a season possible. I’ve also notices the smiles and glow coming from people who thought that their minor contribution had not been seen when to their delight they got a bit of recognition.
Tags: accomplishment, Bonzi sports software, Communication, youth sports software
Posted in Acknowlegement, Coaching, Communication, Developing Kids, Volunteers | No Comments »
August 11th, 2010
Impact; let’s face it, it’s what we want when we take an action in life.
When we choose something to add or subtract from our life we are hoping that we get an impact we both want and can feel. Is there anything more frustrating than to take an action that requires effort, risk, time, money, and political capital and either have nothing discernible happen or have something we don’t want happen?
When choosing youth sports software it is all too easy to not only not get what you wanted but to also be locked in to what you don’t want for years. The consequence of a bad choice in youth sports software can be deep frustration, wasted time, wasted money and heavy political cost to say nothing of compromised relationships.
Why are these consequences so high? For starters almost all youth sports software companies want to lock you in. They do this with auto-renewing long term contracts, no guarantees that what they promise is what they’ll deliver, and the most insidious is that they doubly lock up your data; you can’t export it and you can’t even report it in the ways your situation demands.
Bonzi youth sports software takes a different approach to all this:
- No contracts!
- Your full satisfaction is guaranteed
- Your data is never locked up
- If you can dream up a report you can have it; instantly
- Impact
The key to the list above is #5: impact. Our theory at Bonzi is that if you get the desired impact today and every day from Bonzi’s Youth Sports Software that nothing else will matter. For over ten years 100% of Bonzi’s thousands of customers has gotten the impact they came for every month, every year. They must have because not one of them has been locked into a contract and could have left at a moments notice.
The consequences of a bad choice in youth sports software is, we think you’ll agree, very high; you don’t get the impact you wanted and you are now locked in for years to come. The consequence of choosing Bonzi is that either you’ll get the impact you sought or you’ll be free to make a different choice.
In this nation we are a bit short on trust these days. We are short on trust because many feel that they have been burned over and over again; think oil spills, Wall Street, health insurance, and any of the hundreds of other pain points that seem to pop up every day. The big issue seems to be when people or youth sports software companies want you to give them your trust instead of earning it. At Bonzi we just want the chance to earn your trust… and re-earn that trust every 30 days for ever.
Just imagine if your car company said “if we ever let you down you can bring the car back and stop making the payments immediately”. What if your employer said “if we don’t keep our promises to you we’ll step down and you can get a new manager or management team in here tomorrow”. In essence that is what Bonzi says every day to each of our thousands of customers. And, knock-on-wood, nobody has ever said “get lost”.
You see Bonzi is willing to take the consequences if we don’t give you the impact you were seeking when you signed up unlike most of our competitors who rely upon contracts and lousy software to lock you in.
So it’s you choice; do you want a youth sports software company who is willing to immediately accept the consequences if they don’t achieve the impact you were looking for or do you want to “trust” a story from a company that is so un-confident in their ability to give you the impact you seek that they have to lock you in with an auto-renew contract to keep you from seeking alternatives?
Tags: Bonzi sports software, contracts, online registration, youth sports software
Posted in How to Choose, Parents Win, Performance, Reporting, Uncategorized, Value, Wins for Parents | No Comments »
July 21st, 2010
As many of you know, we at Bonzi have been working on a new online sports scheduling software enhancement to our core sports registration platform for the last few months. This product is based upon our powerful sports scheduling software desktop application and gives you the same scheduling power online that it does on the desktop…only it’s easier, faster and offers more benefits:
- Schedule games instantly!
- Teams already in the system automatically show up when you go to schedule games.
- The scheduler actually does the schedule work for you, unlike most of your alternatives . . . it doesn’t just pair your games and leave you to assign the date, time and location.
- All locations across schedules and between events will be managed for conflicts when games are created.
- Easy drag and drop game edit features let’s you know exactly where you can schedule or move games.
- Unschedule games for a location that’s rained out, and automatically re-schedule with one click.
- Set team conflicts so teams don’t play at the same time and allow travel time for those teams between games.
- Add home preference game sites for teams and times when they can or cannot play.
- All games publish to your web site AND to your team web pages automatically.
- Choose to allow your coaches to enter game scores OR you can enter game scores yourself.
- Standings calculate in real-time as soon as the scores are entered.
The new scheduler is scheduled for BETA release the week of July 26, 2010. More upgrades to this great new product are scheduled after its full release.
Our next newsletter will have a “sneak peek” video of the new online scheduler so you can see how it might work for your organization.
Are you ready to step-up to a truly modern sports scheduling software and leave the whip and buggy days behind? If so give Ricky Aker a call today and book your time for a demo: 503-620-6661 X224
Tags: Bonzi sports software, sports registration, sports schedule software, sports scheduling software, Sports software, team sports software
Posted in How to Choose, Scheduling, Support, Upgrades, Wins for Parents | No Comments »
July 20th, 2010
Why Isn’t Sports Scheduling Software All The Same?
The short answer is because of vision, intention, complexity and skill.
Most sports scheduling software is built with some basic scheduling code that could be used to allocate almost any resource. Many things that must be scheduled are not particularly dynamic in terms of the range that they need to serve. For example, you have a shop floor with 16 people and 8 machines over three shifts. Sure, you may grow, but due to certain logical constraints you’re not likely to grow to 1,000 people and 500 machines. If your sports scheduling software provider started with that kind of software then your limits will likely reflect that and be fairly low. This is all ok for many situations because this relatively low limit fits perfectly with the limited perspective and vision of the provider; they just wanted to schedule for a small league with just a few venues.
Intention and vision are related here. What I can see in my mind’s eye is my vision. My intention by contrast can simply be that I intend for my sports scheduling software to serve unlimited resources in an unlimited fashion – this is what Bonzi sports scheduling software is intended to do.
So maybe I have both the vision and intention to deliver an unlimited capacity to my sports scheduling software. When I get into what I don’t know, I don’t know about making sports scheduling software “unlimited”. I’ll likely find that the level of complexity has gone up exponentially – oh my aching head. Here is where my intention runs headlong into complexity and that begs the question of skill.
Do I have the skills to bring sports scheduling software, that aligns with my intention sufficiently, that I can overcome the exponential increase in complexity driven by my vision? Here in lies the rub; most sports scheduling software doesn’t really have that level of technical skill, the resource budget in time, money and the deep driving commitment to go the distance to produce truly unlimited sports scheduling software is lacking.
There are only a precious few sports software companies like Bonzi that can easily handle a sports organization with over one million members… most sports software is designed to handle very small organizations. Certainly they can handle a huge number of registrations and can build lots of websites and send lots of emails and yes, the larger the organization the more problematic all that becomes if your sports software was not designed from the ground up for this type of duty. All that aside the place sports software companies truly run out of gas is when it comes to the rather low limits on their sports scheduling software.
Should you hit that limit you have only two choices; find another sports software platform that truly can handle it all today (and in the future) or decide that you’ll just tolerate it and see if you can find a work around. Many try the work-around approach until the day comes that the approach makes a total mess of a tournament where hundreds or thousands of people find that their kids have just shown up at a venue and the game can’t go on because of the cheesy sports scheduling software and it’s limits.
Keep your eye peeled for the new release of Bonzi sports scheduling software. Like the rest of the software at Bonzi, we are always improving and this new sports scheduling software will truly lead the entire industry in terms of ease-of-use, capability and power.
If you’d like to schedule a demo just call Ricky Aker at 503-620-6661 X224 and let him know you are ready for a look at the new Bonzi sports scheduling software.
Tags: Bonzi sports software, making decisions, sports schedule software, sports scheduling softwar, sports scheduling software, Sports software
Posted in Scheduling | No Comments »
July 13th, 2010
Team is a term that is thrown around so loosely that you’d think all you have to do to get a team together is to just say the word “team” and voila, you’d have a team… whatever that is.
When you search “team” on the www.amazon.com website in the books category you get approximately 172,000 results returned; obviously the world struggles with “team” otherwise why all the darn books?
So just what does put the team into sports team software? In my observation it’s when two conditions are met: 1) everyone has a shared goal that excites each and every person and 2) all proposed members of the team believe, to some degree, that achievement of that goal is possible … even if it’s not precisely probable.
What we’ve found is that if you got those two things going for you, you can skip all 172,000+ of the books, the seminars, and all the other whoo-haa about teams… because you will have a team. See, what we’ve found, and your mileage may vary, is that when you have a goal that everyone shares, is excited about it and believes that it is possible to achieve even if it might be hard work… then a team naturally and easily forms; that’s what puts the team in sports team software.
There is, of course, a bit more to the software part of the story. The one major threat to a team is a lack of communication. The Bonzi sports team software makes it a breeze to communicate with one or many teams, one or many team members and allows you to do so impromptu, automatically or both.
The bottom line is that as a leader it’s really you that put’s the “team” in sports team software. Yeah, Bonzi is here to help you keep the “team” in sports team software but only you can get it there to start.
Tags: Bonzi sports software, Communication, Sports software, sports team software, Youth Soccer Coaching
Posted in Acknowlegement, Coaching, Communication, Developing Kids, How to Choose, Motivation, Parents Win, Performance | No Comments »
July 9th, 2010
I’ve done it, maybe you’ve done it too; searched for something free on the internet. After all, isn’t that one of the foundations of the internet ethic, that good things can be had for free?
The puzzle is that there are some very good things on the internet that are truly free, such as sites like Wikipedia. But while there are some “free” things of value on the internet, in my observation, there are many, many cases where free turns out to be a sucker punch.
For example take the search term “free soccer software”, it’s searched for over 1,300 times per month on average last time I looked.
Let’s take the cotton candy metaphor for example, and let’s consider that sugar is to cotton candy as free is to soccer software. Cotton candy is almost pure sugar with a bit of color tossed in for interest. Free soccer software might be nominally free but actually offer little else of use and like cotton candy, after the initial thrill is gone you are left with at best little nutrition and possibly cavities. Here’s why…
Free does not get you these important things if you have a real need for soccer software… or any other kind of real sports software for that matter:
- Live, available, skilled and dedicated support; when you get into a ditch, you are truly stuck and may have just wasted a huge amount of time because you can’t get any help.
- Ease of use may be lacking because there is no team of dedicated developers keeping the soccer software code up-to-date and compatible to say nothing of easy to use from a non technical person’s point of view.
- Rich and necessary features – lousy features can usually only be tolerated by soccer software users who only have very, very limited needs. Even the smallest club… maybe particularly the smallest club needs the features they need because they can’t make up the difference with manpower.
- Registration; when money is involved and things go south you’ll need help… that is if free soccer software even have a real and reliable registration feature.
- Scheduling; I suspect that there are some free soccer software scheduling applications out there but when most of the paid soccer scheduling applications have serious limitation it seems to be a stretch of the imagination that a free application would reliably return a satisfactory result for the critical task of scheduling teams, venues, coaches and so on.
- Email; free soccer software without an automated email notification system is, in my opinion, practically worthless as you miss half the point of any sports software and that is to be able to efficiently communicate with the right sub-set of parents, coaches and team members about a specific issue, event or situation.
- Web pages; this seems to be what many really mean when they say free soccer software. The price you pay here is that first they’ll charge you if you need anything beyond a stupid set of minimums and you’ll have to pay if you don’t want them to advertise as they see fit to your visitors.
I’ll stop here but the list goes on and on and on. You get the idea. Free soccer software can easily end up wasting precious time, money and give you a major league case of indigestion and embarrassment if you are the one who innocently recommended going down this problem strewn path with the simple and honorable intent of saving a few bucks.
Bonzi sports software gives you everything you could ever want to support soccer and any other sport all on one ultra high quality and supported platform. The best thing is that Bonzi is the next best thing to free as it’s the lowest overall cost soccer software on the market and is viewed by its customers as far and away the best sports software available in the north american market today.
Tags: Bonzi sports software, Communication, league software reporting, making decisions, online registration, soccer software, Sports software, sports websites, Support
Posted in Communication, Cost of Free, Costs, Parents Win, Performance, Upgrades, Volunteers | No Comments »
July 6th, 2010
How would you feel if your sports software provider told you one or more of the following things?
- We don’t know anything about software but we hear this sports software is one way you can make some money.
- We are in debt up to our eye balls so we’ve got to find every way possible to move money from your bank account to ours
- Support is for wimps – if people need support they can search our FAQ pages
- Registration fees of $5, $6, $7 or more are industry standard, you can’t find anything better.
- Credit card fee’s are just a fact of life at 3.5% and way beyond
- It’s you club, league or sports organization but we still get to advertise on your sites, registration pages and so on
- Sure, we’ve got scheduling software… as long as you don’t have more than 8 – 16 team in your organization we’ll all be just fine
- Upgrades are over rated, we upgrade every 3-5 years because the sports software business just doesn’t change that often
- Mac doesn’t matter; everyone knows that most of the sports world uses PC’s don’t they?
- Everybody requires a contract of 2-5 years
- We hold your money for two weeks or longer because we’re not sure if you’ll have charge-backs
- If you find the software hard to use it’s because you just are trying hard enough…
Would you believe it if I told you that this list is actually fairly short?
Bonzi sports software is NOTHING like the list above in fact we are generally the exact opposite;
- Bonzi is a software development organization that ONLY develops sports software; those who know software well love the way we do it for our customers.
- Bonzi has never had any debt so we can always do the right thing for our customers firs and be the lowest overall cost in the sports software industry
- Our customers who previously used our competitors software tell us loudly that Bonzi has the best and most diverse support in the entire industry
- Our registration fees are the lowest that we know of given what we offer
- Bonzi has the lowest credit card fee’s of any sports software provider; we are fairly certain you can’t find any fees lower
- It’s your sports software and we let you do your own fund raising and advertising on it
- Our scheduling software can handle any combination of teams and venues – it really has no limits
- Bonzi sports software is continually updated – one of our most recent upgrades was the addition of a fully featured “content management” system
- Bonzi is compatible with Mac, iPhone and most browsers
- Bonzi requires no contract
- Bonzi puts your money in your bank account as soon as the transaction clears the bank; usually the next day.
- Bonzi is very, very easy for anyone to use
We think that the devil is in the details when it comes to sports software – we invite you to ask us any and all of the hard questions; we are confident you’ll like the answers.
Tags: Bonzi sports software, contracts, making decisions, online registration, sports registration, Sports software
Posted in Cost of Free, Costs, How to Choose, Parents Win | No Comments »
July 1st, 2010
Parents are the key enabler to kids regular participation in any sport such as soccer, football, baseball, lacrosse, etc.
Kids can’t pay the fee’s, arrange the transportation, juggle the competing demands of a family’s schedule and all the other things that have to come together for a kid to participate in a sport.
Anymore it seems more and more unusual that only one parent in a two parent household can stay home and stay on top of all the logistics to make it happen. in many and maybe most families both parents work and depending on the size of the city or the nature of the work both parents are lucky to get home by dinner time let alone time to get a child a snack, make sure they have everything they need and get them off to practice or a game.
Today it seems that there are more than a few single parent households where the work must come first because it is the only source of income and there is no easy safety net if traffic is bad one day or the boss insists on work into the evening on the day of the big game or the crucial practice (aren’t they all?).
Despite all these challenges parents do their level best, in my observation, to do what it takes to get and keep their kids in sports simply because it is so central to a happy, healthy and well adjusted upbringing in this world. Ask many adults what their fondest memories of growing up were and I’ll bet a role in sports is one of the top three of the fondest memories.
So what’s the point? The point is that we all benefit from happy, healthy and well adjusted kids no matter our age or circumstances. These kids are our nations and the worlds future. This blog post is simply a plea for us all to look around and pitch in when we can to help each other get as many kids into sports as possible. I can’t do anything significant about the national debt, terrorists, or the price of beans in Beirut… but I can keep my eyes open and be sensitive enough to volunteer to provide a ride, give a word of encouragement, or volunteer my logistical support to help out a coach so that the most kids possible get to participate.
Bonzi sports software’s role is simple; we make it easy, fun and very, very affordable. We know that the harder it gets for parents and all the other caring folks who selflessly give to support kids participation the fewer kids get to play. Bonzi sports software can only make the sports registration, scheduling, coach background checking, rostering, and websites easy, fun and affordable… but we think that’s a lot. Beyond that it’s the coaches, volunteers and those dedicated parents who put their plans in second place in favor of the future of their kids.
Tags: accomplishment, Bonzi sports software, leadership, Little league baseball, sports registration, sports schedule software, Sports software, youth sports software
Posted in Acknowlegement, Coaching, Developing Kids, Motivation, Parents Win | No Comments »
June 30th, 2010
One of the most startling things my father ever said to me as I was growing up was “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach”. Being very visual this statement hit me with both the “Yuck” factor of the image and the conviction that the metaphor was spot on in the situation at hand in my life.
24 – 7 – 365; All any of us has is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days in a year. Exactly how many years each of us might be lucky enough to get persists as one of the primary questions in any life. Given all this we can only accomplish so much with our precious time. If this is so then why are we so loath to write down and commit to goals… that are somewhat realistic AND that we reasonably might have the resources to accomplish?
The power of “and”. Last summer I sent my then 16 year old son on a three week Outward Bound adventure. We were warned that the adventure would entail carrying a heavy pack for 10 + miles each day over rugged terrain. To get him ready I thought of all sorts of complicated exercise routines but in the end decided to opt for something simple that had a high likelihood of actually happening often enough that the end result would be a level of conditioning that would allow my moderately sedentary son to have a good time and not hate me the rest of his long life. At first I was just going to have him walk home from school each day; nice, simple and likely to happen. The magic was the power of the “and”. Each day he took a pack with him to school and each week we added 5 pounds to the pack so by the last week prior to his Outward Bound departure he was carrying 60 lbs for 2.5 miles each day.
So why am I telling you this? Because for once in my life I got real about the: 1) goal, 2) resources and 3) time that we had to accomplish something. Had I made this complex my son would not have been prepared for what turned out to often be 10+ hours of walking each day and often more than 10 miles over steep terrain including snow. As it turned out my son was by far the most physically fit kid on the trip and as a result he had a truly life changing experience.
The key was two-fold; first we got real and clear about what our goal, resources and time was for the mission at hand, second we kept it simple enough to get done but not so simple that it didn’t meet the need; we included the powerful “and” of both the walking and the gradually increasing weight in the pack.
Too often I fail and see others fail when we don’t get real with people in sports and recognize the reality of our goals, resources and time… and as a result we don’t accomplish anything other than creating chaos and frustration. Workout routines that are simple and have limited objectives can often achieve most of our goals for a sport while staying within our resource limits and the little time most modern schedules can allocate.
At Bonzi sports software we too are faced with being real about our goals, resources and time. As one of the fastest growing sports software companies in the world (according to our consultant) our growth consumes resources and time along with our commitment to world-class support, providing the best sports registration software, sports scheduling software, team website software enabled with an easy-to-use content manager all in a no contract customer relationship. All this comes back to our goal; a great and frustration free experience for our dedicated volunteers, administrators and parents associated with sports such as soccer, football, basketball, baseball, softball, lacrosse, hockey , little league and volley ball.
We have found that if we keep it simple and real we can leverage the power of the “and” thereby both delivering a great experience every day for our clients and growing faster than any of our competitors without losing clients.
So what do you think? Are we achieving our objective?
Tags: accomplishment, Bonzi sports software, leadership, Little league baseball, sports registration, sports schedule software, sports team software, sports websites, team websites, youth sports software
Posted in Acknowlegement, Coaching, Communication, Developing Kids, Motivation, Parents Win, Performance, Volunteers | No Comments »
June 25th, 2010
For many who have worked around the quest to improve performance in baseball, football, lacrosse, basketball… or any other endeavor in life we know that often the foundation of performance amounts to the combination of willing and able.
Simply put is the person performing both willing to perform and able?
The Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, in their amazing book “Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” suggest that change, in this example changing from good performance to great performance, may require two critical things; clarity of what is required to make the change i.e. more exercise or better nutrition… and a specific and simple action that can be taken to get there.
In our experiences with performance it also helps to have both clarity of an inspiring win in personal terms and an internally or externally imposed “what by when” or “butt on the line” to take a specific action by a specific date.
Also from our experience we’ve learned that often the first step towards performance is a “what by when” for execution of an activity or more specifically an outcome i.e. run five miles. The next step and a step often regarded as an order of magnitude more difficult is to sign-up for an outcome instead of just an activity i.e. run five miles in under 30 minutes. I like to say that the professionals sign-up for outcomes while the amateurs sign-up for activities.
In the sports software or sports registration and scheduling software market Bonzi is well known as the company and I do mean the company that signs-up to lead and perform on all fronts; Bonzi signs-up for outcomes for our clients vs. just going through the activities. So what do I mean? In the following categories:
- league scheduling software
- league management software
- sports tournament software
- sports website software
- sports registration software
- online league software
with versions for every sport played on this earth (or at least so it seems)… Bonzi sports software has signed-up to meet or exceed our users expectations on the following fronts just to name a few:
- Free, ultra high quality, friendly and available support – even one-on-one training.
- Super easy to use yet easily the most powerful application on the market… and the only sports software that has a fully functioning content manager for website creation and management.
- Lowest overall cost and no forced advertising on your site and in your emails.
- Your money in your bank account every day.
- No contracts, no surprises and no games to have to explain to your board of directors after they’ve made the initial authorization – you’ll never feel like a dummy with Bonzi
- And about a million other goodies we know you’ll love like iPhone access and broader browser support than any other.
So we started this post speaking about “willing and able”. At Bonzi our performance rests on our being willing and able to give you the best sports software money can buy at the lowest cost… all so we can support your willing and able to perform in the sport you love.
Tags: accomplishment, Bonzi sports software, leadership, league software reporting, Little league baseball, making decisions, online registration, Performance, Sports software, sports team software, sports websites, team sports, team sports software, youth sports software
Posted in Communication, Costs, Motivation, Reporting, Scheduling, Support, Volunteers, Wins for Parents | No Comments »
