A volunteer board raised a season's worth of gear money in six weeks.
Northline United had 14 teams, a parent board with day jobs, and a fall kit bill nobody had budgeted for. In Play ran the campaign end to end — offer, creative, outreach, and follow-up — while the club coached.
What wasn't working
- • Every season started with the same email blast from the same two board members.
- • Gear orders lived in a spreadsheet, payments in three different apps.
- • Nobody could say which outreach actually produced money.
What changed
- • Goal cleared with two weeks left in the window
- • Every gift receipted automatically, with the deductible portion separated from merchandise value
- • A clean supporter list the club owns — exportable, segmented, and ready for spring
- • Board reporting produced from the dashboard instead of a Sunday-night spreadsheet
What In Play ran
Instead of a generic donation ask, we built a branded fall kit store with team-level pages, so buying a hoodie and supporting the club were the same action.
In Play produced the campaign page, the email sequence, the social calendar, and the team captain assets. The board approved; they didn't write.
Each of the 14 teams got a peer-to-peer page with its own thermometer. The leaderboard did the nagging so coaches didn't have to.
Mid-campaign the pace flagged. The Mission Score flagged it, In Play shipped a re-engagement send, and the last ten days produced a third of the total.
"We stopped asking parents to be marketers. The campaign ran, the money came in, and our board meeting took twenty minutes instead of two hours."