I just sent an email to all our pool group admins (i.e. people who created a pool group) for our World Cup 2010 Pool, but I thought I should post it here too for the benefit of anyone still planning to create a group.
This is a message just for everyone who created a pool group for the World Cup 2010 Pool at MyOfficePool.ca.
Off the top, thanks for coming to the website, and creating a group taking advantage of this new feature. I hope it is working well for you so far.
The World Cup is now less than two weeks away, and I still see a number of groups with not a lot of people in them. I’m going to go through some of the functionality of the pool groups to make things easier for you, but my overriding message here is, “what can I do to help?”
If there is a way I can help you get more people in your group, or a way to make it easier for your invitees to get around the website and in the group, then let me know and we’ll try to work it out.
Pool Group Features
Okay, the pool groups have gone through a couple rounds of changes, so if you haven’t read the recent blog posts, you might have missed some of the latest stuff.
1. Group Password
Initially, all invitees to your group needed to join by way of a personal invite from you through the website. Now, you can bypass that by setting a group password and just letting people know what the name of your group is and what the password is.
When they join the pool, at the bottom of the picks entry form, they can select the pool group from a drop-down list (note only groups that use a password are in the list), input the password and they are in.
A big benefit of this system is that people in your group can pass on the info to any of their friends so they can join too. It helps spread the word faster. Of course, you retain complete control to remove unwanted people from your group.
2. Mark Paid / Unpaid
If you are running a pool with a little cash on the line, then you’ll want to keep track of who is paid or unpaid. You can do that simply by going to your pool group admin panel and marking each individual in your group as one or the other, update group members, and that information is saved.
Note however the paid or unpaid status is not shown on the results page, so you’ll have to keep pestering the potential deadbeats in your pool until they pay up.
3. Email Your Group or Invitees
On your pool group admin page, you’ll potentially see two separate lists of names or email addresses. They are split between people who are already in your pool group, and those who you sent an official invite to but haven’t joined the pool or your group yet.
To the right of this, I added a text box for each list of just the email addresses, separated by commas. You can select this entire text, copy it (CTRL-C on Windows) and then paste it (CTRL-V) into your email program, so you can email a message to one list or the other, or both.
This should be much better than keeping track of the names and email addresses separately, and making sure you included everyone on your email when you are relaying info about the rules, how to send you money, prize payouts or just rallying them to get in gear and get in the pool.
I think that gives a good overview of the key features of the pool groups. One thing to keep in mind about trying to get people into an office pool is that people are notorious procrastinators, especially for an entertainment distraction like this.
Depending when you sent out your latest invites to the pool, you might want to send out another reminder this week, but then almost certainly you’ll want to send one out Monday or Tuesday of next week with a “Last Call” or “Final Reminder” urgency to it.
The World Cup starts a week from this Friday, so that final reminder should be close enough to the deadline they can’t procrastinate much more, but with enough time they can get in without feeling rushed.
Again, if you have any questions or issues with your pool group, then let me know. If you want to disband your group for whatever reason, let me know and I will delete it for you, so you’re then free to join another group.