Matlink makes events better with feature rich engagement
UP designs and deploys digital platform to streamline sports marketing event management and drive value to coaches, competitors and event creators.
The Matlink vision originated in the recognition of numerous fundamental pain points within competitive wrestling events, largely centered around outmoded manual processes that produced high incidence of error, inefficiency and most importantly
were robbing from the potential for the fun and enthusiasm that should surround these events. These deficiencies were contributing to significant contraction and attrition in event attendance and reduced profitability for promoters. Promoters were increasingly
frustrated by the lack of available options to integrate digital processes capable of conforming to the unique need-sets of competitive wrestling or were limited to solutions with clumsy, under-supported, error-prone user interfaces and feature-sets.
Tedium
Chaos
Confusion
Inefficiency
Inacuracy
UP launched the Matlink initiative to address these issues through the development of a centralizing, SaaS-based solution, to unify, streamline, and enable the growth and health of competitive wrestling as our first test category for the platform. Competitive wrestling was comprised of three interconnected and interdependent parts: Parents & Competitors, Coaches & Teams,
Leagues & Promoters, and that they all shared a common passion — they loved wrestling. But we also identified numerous barriers related to legacy processes that were frustrating everyone and sucking the love out of competitive wrestling: disenfranchising parents and competitors, burdening coaches and teams, poisoning opportunity for growth and siphoning profitability to leagues and
promoters. These barriers were rooted in 5 operational functions of the ecosystem relative to promotion and registration, information exchange, payment methods, efficiency and operations and enabling software. To respond to the ecosystem need-sets with a feature rich digital platform we broke the central functions of the solution down into three modules: Compete, Coach, & Promote.
Core
1. Quick and secure event registration
2. Cashless pre-payment and payment of dues or auto-pay
3. Receive push notifications and opted in content
4. Brows events and upcoming tournaments
5. Purchase team equipment
6. Quick links to partner retailers for equipment discounts and special offers
7. Event quick view and access to pre-event bracket and ranking information and statistics
8. Create a participant dash board with competitor profiles and social integration to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Flickr
9. Browse and / or join teams
10 Refer friends and earn rewards
1. Automated event fee and dues collection
Compete
module
Coach
module
Promote
module
2. Create publish and market special events
3. Batch send / automate team coms
4. Digital fulfillment of team equipment
5. Team / competitor management tools
6. Browse and / or join leagues.
7. Opt in to promoter notification and content
8. Browse competitive team / league profiles
9. Build custom team and event pages
1. Create and market events / tournaments
2. Receive automatic event / tournament payment
3. Paperless bracket management
4. automated bracket seeding system
5. Real-time scoring
6. Mobile scoring with Match Score
7. Create custom event promos, ads and landing pages
8. Compare /contrast event / tournament stats, results and revenue in real-time
9. Create, edit and manage leagues and teams
10. Batch automate league, team,coach, district or even special list based communications
11. Create and deploy custom campaigns
12. Become an affiliate and earn rewards
1. Free to use enterprise software
2. Enhanced, and intuitive interface
3. Scalable, licensable core
4. Extensible modular feature set
5. Back end controls and user dash
6. Fluid updates via custom CMS
7. 3rd party database
integration
8. Secure technology road map
9. Deep support and leadership
Matlink was built over a modular framework allowing the core to scale easily around future feature integrations, as well as readily adapt to other event marketing verticals. We discovered the leading fail point of other incumbent digital management platforms lay squarely in three key deficiencies relating to:
responsive support and service, features that demanded more complex back end tasks and algorithms, and lastly data capture and modeling.
Subsequently these were amongst some of the top system enabling features the Matlink platform was designed to address. One such key feature was the ability to populated, live
update and push brackets out to competitors. The algorithm this demanded was one of the most complex feature achievements of the platform, but also eliminated one of the most arduous and error prone, time sucking, legacy paper processes event promotors loathed, but had no realistic solution to.
Similarly event managment ranging from ticketing to promotion and marketing could all be driven from features like the calendar.
Realtime widgets like the match clock put the power of scoring right in the hands of the refs at the mat and synchronized another key data steam back to promotors to make events run more fluidly, to coaches wanting to track performance, and to competitors to map their development.
Matlink's robust data modeling gave promotors something they'd never had before — meaningful, actionable market intelligence, capable of informing business decisions, driving growth and continuously enhancing event experiences.
Matlink expanded monetization opportunities for promotors by delivering a high value vehicle for sponsors while deriving revenue to support itself through transactional and ad based income, making Matlink a free license for promotors.
Matlink's core, UP.LINK, is open for feature adaptation and licensing across other sport and entertainment based event marketing and promotion verticals such as youth soccer, little league, martial arts, dance studios or can be feature scaled and skinned for corporate event marketers.