We are looking to provide more resources for existing affiliates as mentioned in the last paragraph of the post. We have reached out to many tournament directors and asked for ideas. Unfortunately, however, we haven’t received many and haven’t come up with many ideas internally either. If you have any ideas, please share them here!
The first task of a marketing team would be to learn the correct name of the organization.
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Savir,
The more I think about it, there are few “marketing” ideas that I really want.
If USCF could introduce more players to chess in our area, I’d love that, and I really don’t care how that happens.
So the things that I really want are more all on the minutia of running a tournament, such as eliminating the existence of IDs with 0000-00-00 expiration dates, allowing TDs to make corrections in events without manual intervention (99% perfection means a lot of eventual issues in 100+ events a year), and I’d love some USCF tool support for posting pairings and crosstables of ongoing events.
…I mean, making the email blasts free rather than a nickel wouldn’t hurt, either.
So, you don’t have any great ideas on how to do this, either. 
The problem with the 0000-00-00 expiration dates doesn’t have a simple fix. The first step is to keep more of these from being generated; it does not appear that the steps taken after the Town Hall meeting fully achieved that. What to do with all those IDs (over 40,000 of them at last count) is also tricky. If we just deleted those IDs from MSA and the ratings supplement databases, that might actually make things worse. (Several hundred of these IDs have been used in rated events, we certainly shouldn’t delete those.)
TDs being able to make corrections to rated events is on the planning board for the Leago system next year. It will probably be a two-step process, the TD enters the updated information and then the office has to approve those changes.
I’m not sure what you mean by support for posting pairings and results of ongoing events. Post them where? For how long? I know that they do this at national events, but there’s a non-trivial infrastructure supporting that, extending it to other ongoing events would present numerous challenges. This might be something that the pairing program authors could offer as a feature, but who will pay their costs for supporting and hosting that data? There are some third party services offering event registration (with associated fees, I assume), maybe they could handle that as well.
Email isn’t free to the companies that send it, and there is staff overhead involved in setting up and running email blasts. I could see increasing the number of free blasts or having reduced costs to help promote certain types of events, but advertising your events is in the long run just another cost of running them, like site costs.
Email is IMHO not the promotional tool it was even a few years ago, due to spammers, ISP restrictions and filters, CAN-SPAM act compliance and unread emails. My numbers are a few years old but if there are 1000 members in your target audience, US Chess can probably only send emails to half of those (the rest have either opted out or don’t have an email address on file), and less than half of those emails will get opened, probably more like 25%.
Back when I was organizing/directing, I sent out postcards to players in recent events, these days that’s pretty darned expensive, 56 cents for postage, last time I looked. 500 of them would run at least $280.
No. If anything came obviously to mind, a) I would have mentioned it and b) I might have gone into marketing.
I understand it isn’t a simple fix for these dates, but they continue to be a pain point.
Rejecting the request for a way to make corrections without manual intervention by USCF, I understand.
Somewhere publicly available through a way sublink of uschess.org, and for up to 7 days (not a hard and fast number) after the end date of the event.
You understand why I’m not real impressed with “here are some things I could use” being met with “but that might take effort or cost money.”
And this is even worse, since it’s directly responding to a solicited request for marketing suggestions by rejecting the idea.
- What could USCF do to support affiliates’ marketing efforts?
- Could you make the email blasts free?
- No, that would cost money.
Doesn’t SwissSys already do this? (Posting pairings, etc.)
King has some facility for this, although the current interface leaves something to be desired.
I’ll did more into SwissSys but I didn’t think they had hosting.
I’m afraid you can thank your fellow TDs for the necessity of having safeguards on making corrections to rated events. Past privileges have been abused, and there’s no reason to think that would not happen in the future as well. It’s also easier and cheaper to build the controls in up front and then decide if they can be relaxed than to add them after the fact.
I won’t be making the decisions on what features the Leago system supports or what limitations are put on them, I’m just offering US Chess my advice based on over 20 years of experience, and I can pretty much guarantee that there will probably be some features that don’t make the cut or ones that do which I think are less desirable.
Life in general would be a lot easier and less expensive if there weren’t so many bad actors out there.
SafeSport wouldn’t exist if there hadn’t been a number of highly publicized abusers in sports, including chess, by the way.
Shoplifting is said to increase retail costs by anywhere from 1% to over 10% depending on the type of store and location.
We wouldn’t need much of an army, navy or air force if there weren’t wars and terrorists.
I know you have said the above in the past. These controls being worthwhile still does not make sense to me. There seem to me to be two different possibilities:
- The tournament report as corrected would have been accepted by USCF if it had been submitted with that information originally. In this case, the potentially malevolent TD doesn’t need to issue a correction, just submit the “pre-corrected” report.
- The tournament report as corrected would have been rejected by USCF if it had been submitted with that information originally. In this case, there’s no issue as long as a corrected report is validated in the same manner as an original submission.
In addition to the above, USCF already monitors various forms of manipulation, so “excessive corrections that [perform some malevolent action]” could be added to the list.
Everyone has great ideas when those ideas involve someone else spending money.
It might make sense for US Chess (has it been years since we abandoned the USCF acronym?) to implement things where large scale creates significant efficiencies. But if there’s a cost someone pays it.
Email blasts are not free. Making them free to affiliates simply shifts the cost to US Chess, and that comes itself from other sources, like membership dues.
So convince me that at scale creates useful efficiencies, and then justify the cost to US Chess, and I’m possibly sold.
But just saying “make it free” quite rightly should get you nowhere.
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Perhaps I shouldn’t have phrased it as a question. SwissSys can output a file that you can upload to their site at no additional charge. And voila, online pairings, standings, etc.
Personally, if I was designing it I’d probably think about having a multi-tier system for corrections, certain types of corrections might not require approval, like changing one result or one ID in an event. Maybe experienced and trusted TDs could be given wider discretion to make such corrections.
One limitation I might put in would be that the TD would not be allowed to make any corrections to an event in which that TD was a player without some kind of non-automated review, many of the most egregious abuse situations have been attempts by a TD to manipulate their own rating.
I’d also probably put in a cumulative limit on the number of changes that can be made to an event before they need review. (Numerous changes to a rated event may be a sign of something else, like a poorly trained TD.)
Time limits on changes might also be a factor, someone changing an event from 10 years ago is not all that unusual, but there may be a backstory to that change that might justify approval.
Pre-announcing a pending change is another possibility, let the players in the tournament (or their parents) raise complaints if they don’t agree with a pending correction.
I don’t see all the correction requests that come to the office via email, but I see enough of them that it is not unusual for little Johnny to lose a game, tell his mom he won, and then mom write the office when the loss shows up on MSA. That’s why we always tell players and parents that corrections to an event must go through the TD/affiliate. More than a few moms have written back to say that their kid 'fessed up.
We used to have a system for allowing TDs to correct spelling changes in a member’s name in TD/A. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out that they could change Robert Smith into Samuel Wilson, one letter at a time over several hours.
But it is worth pointing out that when there are things like people stealing from their employer, the more trusted someone is, the bigger the amount they can steal. :sigh:
I’m still finding pages with ‘USCF’ on it, I corrected one of them today. Last week I had the publications people correct several forms that still had the Crossville address in them. A few years ago I found one that still had the New Windsor NY address in it!
Just spitballing here, but I wonder if it would be feasible to email the affected players about a pending change in a rated event before it goes through?
If a result is being changed, both players would be notified.
If a pairing is being changed, all affected players and their opponents would be notified.
If an ID is being changed, both the current ID and the new ID would be notified (and possibly all opponents.)
Of course we couldn’t do this if we didn’t have those players’ email addresses on file.
Another possibility, based on the concept of either notifying players per the above or publishing the requested change on the tournament crosstable, would be to have a waiting period before changes were made. (That may depend somewhat on how rerates are handled on Leago, currently we could do something like say that all changes must wait at least 48 hours and until the next rerate pass after that before updated ratings are computed.)
Perhaps each crosstable should show the total number of changes that have been made to the event since it was first rated.
I was looking at the National Events bidding document the other day and noticed it still has the Crossville address listed on top. bidding-guidelines-202401_0.pdf (uschess.org)
The rating report crosstables still use the term “USCF” a number of times.
I’m sure there are many such pages that are out of date in one way or another.
You may have forgotten the context this comes up in, which is quite literally “how could USCF help affiliates with marketing?”
If there was an implicit / explicit “…unless it would cost USCF any money or take any USCF effort”, it would have been pretty obviously a fake offer.
My club, while not particularly that big, rates over 3000 games a year. We’re over 99.5% accurate on collecting results, but that still means once every so often (every 6 weeks, I’d guess) we have to send in a correction request, almost always of the “flip a single result” level.
That would make correction system almost completely useless to the clubs again. If it was a correction to the TD’s own result, I could see requiring manual review, though.
EDIT: right, right, divide the number of players by 2 for the number of nightly games.
Well, result changes create two correction entries, one for each player, but forgetting to divide the number of games by 2 is something I’ve done more than once myself when pulling data from game records rather than player records.
I didn’t say it couldn’t cost money. I said convince me it’s worth the cost.
Money and effort are finite resources. US Chess should spend their money wisely. I’m not convinced free (to affiliates) email blasts are worth it. YMMV.
Well, let’s benchmark USCF pricing against some sources (which could be competitors, if not for USCF not releasing the emails for security reasons).
Mailchimp’s free tier allows sending up to 1000 total emails monthly to 500 recipients.
Twilio sendgrid’s free tier allows sending to 100 emails daily.
Brevo allows 300 emails a day, again for free.
…so USCF could match the free tier of actual bulk email services as a starting point.
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Yeah, there’s some sense to that.
Just out of curiosity, I ran a check on the number of player-directors in events in the last 13 months.
In 47,151 sections rated since June of last year there were 5260 sections in which the chief TD for the event was also a player in the event. (Some of those were probably extra game sections where the TD played someone with a bye to give that person another rated game.) Another 167 sections with the chief TD as a player were coded as matches.