Assignor/Client Broadcast

The Broadcast mechanism can precisely target your message to small subsets of the User group. The mechanism is comprehensive and thus complex. Spending the time to understand your options will improve your communications.

Excessive use of Broadcast and/or sending messages to individuals that do not want to receive the message can and has labeled us as SPAMMERS.   When this happens messages get automatically deleted, or the number of messages is restricted, or the rate of sending messages is throttled.   The result - your important messages are not received by the targeted individuals.   

Each user establishes how and where they want to receive certain types of messages.   This is the user's choice.   We cannot and do not force messages upon the users.

Assignors and some Clients are expressly given permission (via the Positions Table) to have access to the Broadcast capabilities of the website. Clients that run their own referee programs typically have Broadcast rights. Use Broadcast to:

• Solicit referees for future assignments
• Contact referees regarding current assignments.
• Contact referees regarding registration.
• Contact referees regarding continuing education opportunities.
• Contact Clients or Assignors
• More....

The list of Referees in the database is long and includes individuals from throughout Northern California. As an Assignor you should try to limit your Broadcast appeals. Specific messages targeted to specific subsets of referees are much more effective. Contacting too many Referees for assignments, that they are not interested in, leads to unhappy Referees. A high volume of broadcasts:

• Can lead to Pensra.org being labeled as a "spammer" (So important that we repeat it!) 
• Increases the costs of operating the website
• Contributes to "cry wolf" situation where messages are ignored

The number of Users you contact should make sense considering the message. Always try to limit the size of your recipient list to under 400, preferably under 150 individuals. The number of broadcasts you send to the number of Users is monitored.

Some Criteria can have more than one selection at a time. These criteria have the icon to the right of the drop down menu. . To select multiple choices click on the icon and then CTRL-Click on the selections you want as part of the criteria.

There are a number of ways that you, the Assignor, can target Referees/Users.

A. Broadcast Criteria

This box refers to user table data.
1.  Role typically is Referee, but you can also select other Client, Assignor etc.  select.

2.  These boxes refers to the Referee's age. If you are seeking a referee to fill a U19 match, you can specify '21-100' . If you are recruiting youth referees for a mentoring session, you could specify '10-18'.  For example if targeting teenagers enter 13  and 19 in the two boxes.

3.  When did the user last logon?  This is a date comparator box. This box refers to when the Referee last logged onto the website. Some referees in the database have never logged on. You can enter '> 9/1/2008' to target referees that have logged on since 9/1/2008. You can enter '> -3 months' to target referees that have logged on in the last 3 months. You can enter '< -2 years' to target referees that are not active at all. You need a comparator (<,>,or =) and either a specific date mm/dd/yyyy or a period of time in days, months or years.  For more on date comparators see https://www.ridgestar.com/comparator

4.  When did the user first logon to the www.pensra.org ?   This is a date compartor box.

5.  Looks at the dusPayPal datafield of the Referee. Most common is to put in "isnull" for those that do not have a PayPal address|phone. That way you can reach out to those referees that do not have a PayPal email address|phone and tell them that they will not get paid (if you pay via PayPal)

6.  Referees can specify which geogrphic areas they are specifically interested in working in. If you are the Assignor for the XYZ Club in San Francixcoe and you are looking for Referees for this weekend, perhaps it would be best to approach those referees that have specifically indicated that they are interested in assignments in San Francisco.

7.  Characteristic refers to something specific dealing with the User. Examples are

• New Users
• Locked out Users
• Different Assignor rights
• Users with photos on file
• Referees that are STAR referees
• Referees that are permitted to use the TouchLine mobile application
• Referees that work high school
• etc.

8.  Contact all the referees that live in one town. This is a fragment entry, so "San" will get you San Mateo and San Carlos and San Jose and San Leandro.

B. License Criteria

9.  This box refers to the Referee's USSF Referee license. Most referees are "Referee -Grade 8". Use the option to select more than one grade.

10.  Referees have two ranking sets:

• Adult
• Youth

In each set, Referees have two values

• one for the Referee position
• one for the Assistant Referee position

The rank is a number from 1 to 8 which is an indication of the relative experience and capability of the referee.

If you are looking for an Assistant Referee for a U12 match in the Spring, perhaps you should not solicit the top ranked referees. Select Youth, and put 'AR from 1 to 4' in the Rank criteria and you will be targeting referees that are more likely to want this match.

Alternatively, if you are looking for a referee for a BU19 Class 1 match, you could specify Youth and 'Ref from 6 to 8'.

DO NOT over constrain yourself. Choose a Referee range or an AR range but NOT both.

11.  This box refers to the date the USSF License expires. This is a date comparator box.   You can use "<{date}" or "Year{last year}"   For more on date comparators see https://www.ridgestar.com/comparator  . Use this to send a blast to all referees that are not current to tell them to register with USSF.

12.  This box refers to the USSF License number. Starting around 2010, USSF used the first four characters of the USSF number to indicate the first year that the referee was licensed. The License number format changed around 2018 and now is sequential increasing. 

13.  Contact all the referees with a specific AYSO badge or no AYSO badge. Note the drop down has the option for both Advanced + National referees for those U19 matches. Contact only Intermediate referees about an Advanced class.  Expiration refers to when the Referee's AYSO registration is recorded as expiring. AYSO referees have to register annually. The AYSO Regional Referee Coordinator enters their registration expiration here. You can search for AYSO referees that have never had their registration expiration date entered "<1/1/1970" or are just recently out of date. last logged onto the website. Some referees in the database have never logged on.
You can enter a specific date and comparator ("<12/1/1/2017") or a relative date comparator (">today").  The AYSO referee coordinators are notoriously bad at keeping this data current.  

C. Position Criteria

There is a Positions table.   Here are listed the Clients, Asignors, Referee Coordinators, Trasurers, etc.   These titles are not rigourously maintained may not be useful.

D. Continuing Education Criteria

You can filter on referees that have taken or have not taken a specific Pensra on-line continuing education module. Each referee can have a different status for each continuing education module - for example Fail, Pass or Incomplete. You can use the icon to select more than one status for a continuing education module - for example Fail and Incomplete.

E. Clinic Criteria

You can filter on referees that have registerd for or  taken a specific Pensra clinic. Each referee can have a different status for each clkinix.  You can use the icon to select more than one status,

14.  This is a date comparator box.   

F. Assignment Criteria

The Assignments line is very powerful. You can use it to contact only Referees that have worked for you in the past, or Referees that are scheduled to work for you in the future or Referees that have never worked for you. 

Looking for referees with specific Assignment characteristics is computer resource intensive.    Keep your date ranges tight.    

15.  To use the Assignment Critiera you must the small input box.  

16.  You choose to search for only Referees or Mentors or Assistant Referee assignments.   Can be useful if you want to target only the Center Referee.

17.   High and low number of assignments.   If you are looking at a single weekend "1 - 12" will often suffice.   If looking for referees to take one more match, 1-4 might be a good range.   

18.  This is the date range that the referee has worked assignments. Place a date in the mm/dd/yyyy format in each box. In this manner you can target Referees that have worked for you last season, but not this season in your email blast.

Or select referees that are working only this upcoming weekend

Can use absolute dates in the DD/MM/YYYY format or relative dates such as

• tomorrow
• today
• next week
• Friday
• +1 month
• -2 weeks

G. The Message

19.   This will be the subject in an email message.   The email message will come from Broadcast@pensra.org.   Often the email message will go to the User's SPAM folder.   

20.  It is a good practice to not be fancy in your message. There are different email standards and the simple message will work on the most devices. Be careful with HTML, bullet points, special characters, pictures, graphics, flash, etc.   If  you want to embed a link, often (not guaranteed) you can put HTML into your broadast.   Might be a good practice to include a "space" after your link or HTML.

 Example:

This will / could look like 

Website for PAASL Information

It is also good practice to keep each Broadcast to a single message. Don't talk about upcoming Education opportunities, Registration and Tournament rules in the same message.

21. You can "compose a message offline" in a program such as TextPad and save the file on your local machine. The Choose File button can then be used to pick up the file and add it to the Message box as a "text string".

The offline file should contain ONLY Text (not "control characters" or special fonts).And most definitely, the Choose File button is NOT for adding Attachments.

You cannot attach files to Broadcast messages (anti-SPAM rules).

Some Assignors have two or more standard messages. You can compose that message once, store it on your desktop and bring it into Broadcast via the Choose File option. Or you can have multiple Personal Criteria and store each stanadard message as a separate Personal Criteria.

22. From which of your 4 Profile emails do you want this message to appear to originate?  

+Me? Do you want a copy of the email that you send out? Click here. This way you can see what is actually being seen by the Referees. You might note that special characters and fonts do NOT travel well through this Broadcast system / Email in general. You may want to limit non-standard characters, bullet points, and special formats. Copying a document from a word processor and pasting it here will give unsatisfactory results. 

You can choose Send=Off and +Me. This will send your Broadcast only to yourself to see how it might look to your intended recipients. Make edits and then select Send=On and Show again.

23.  You must choose to which Subscription List the message will be sent. Don't send a urgent last minute plea for a referee to "Announcements". Don't send a message about registration deadlines to "Critical Assignments".

Users can subscribe to different "Lists". The Users can choose where messages sent via Broadcast are delivered. Users make this choice at Services:Subscriptions. You can see the choices of Subscriptions available at Services:Subscriptions (or Services:Profile-Messaging).

24. Your Broadcast will be stored for viewing for the specified period of time. Messages regarding the entire season can be stored for 4 months. Messages regarding the upcoming weekend's assignments can be stored for 2 weeks. Users (and you) can see the stored messages at Services-Subscriptions.

25.  When you finally get finished and click on "Show" you will get a list of all the referees that meet the criteria you have selected. Look over this list. Is it too long? Then you can use a box to select or deselect each referee - for example you really don't want to send this email to Joe Smith. This Options box chooses whether the default will be selected or deselected.

If your list of referees is over 250 or so, many browsers will choke on the ability select from the list. If this case you may see "n/a" in the results list. You can also choose "n/a" here to avoid the situation.

Show

If you find that you use the same settings every time you visit Assignor:Broadcast, click on the button. These settings will become your personal default.  You can have up to four personal criteria defaults.   See Services:Preferences.

Click on the button to change the page to your default and click again to step through personal criteria and to go to the Site default and the software default.

Click on 'Show' to see the names of the Referees your message will go to. This list is on a new page. You can select/deselect individual names. Then you must hit 'Send' to actually send your message.

If you need this list of referees for anything else - say a checkin at a seminar - you can click on icon to get a CSV (comma separated values) file that is readable by MicroSoft Excel.

Updated 9/29/2017

Complete revision  3/20/2024