USA WEIGHTLIFTING ONLINE COMPETITIONS
USA WEIGHTLIFTING KEEPS COMPETITIONS ALIVE DURING COVID USING LAUNCHPAD6
Challenged by COVID-19 restrictions, USA Weightlifting decided to move both National Event qualifiers and Recruitment events online with great success.
THE CHALLENGE
The mission of USA Weightlifting is to support United States athletes in achieving excellence in olympic and world competition and to support, promote, and educate a diverse and inclusive community of weightlifting. USA Weightlifting relies heavily on in person events to run competitions, and with the cancellation of many of these events due to COVID-19 they still needed a way to provide an outlet for members to compete and keep them engaged.
“Due to many of the physical events being cancelled we needed to act swiftly to ensure members still had opportunities to compete” says Suzy Sanchez Director, Culture, Community & Outreach for USA Weightlifting.
Not only were live events impacted, the ability for USA Weightlifting to drive new recruitment into the sport was also significantly effected. The goals of increasing member engagement and driving recruitment inspired USA Weightlifting to take their competitions online to help members and non-members compete in a safe but still engaging way.
A TRUSTED PARTNER WAS CALLED!
The competitions would be open to members and non-members to service both Nationals Qualifiers and Recruitment Events to attain new members.
The specific goals for the online competitions were to:
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Provide members with a key engagement outlet with their sport through competition
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Allow members to qualify to National level events and subsequent Olympic qualifiers
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Drive new recruitment among schools and colleges to continue to boost sport involvement.
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Running an online competition meant finding a platform partner that would:
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Manage the scale and detail across multiple events within one solution
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Be super easy and fast to set up
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Give entrants an intuitive and seamless way of uploading video entries and other supporting content from any kind of device
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Deliver a judging portal to assess and award medals and achieve qualifications
Challenge
Find a way of replacing in-person competitions to engage members
Continue to drive recruitment into the sport
Provide a way to allow members to qualify for National events
Solution
Pivot to an online weightlifting competition with Launchpad6
Work with a partner who delivers video upload, gallery and judged assessments
Provide a simple to use solution that works the way they needed
Services Offered
ContestPad Video Contest (Premium)
White labelled microsite for dedicated USA Weightlifting branded portal
Results
✓ 200+ entries per recruitment event
✓ 150+ entries per monthly National Qualifier event
✓ 160,000+ page views
✓ Fantastic positive feedback from participants
LAUNCHPAD6 DELIVERS
USA Weightlifting had previously used Launchpad6 and after comparing multiple solutions in the market they new without doubt that Launchpad6’s ContestPad was the right solution.
PLATFORM CAPABILITIES MATCH REQUIREMENTS
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Launchpad6 allows for seamless judging of entries across multiple rounds
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Launchpad6 supported multiple individual events within the one platform
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Launchpad6 could collect important participant details to aid list creation and subsequent contact and recruitment
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Multiple video and other files could be uploaded with each entry to support lift validation and assessments
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The website can be easily branded and styled to match the specifics of each event
Multiple events were created including Monthly National Qualifiers and Recruitment drive showdowns for school and colleges. Each participant uploaded videos of lifts and evidence based content such as weigh-in and barbell weight verification videos.
A ONLINE EVENT SUCCESS!
The online events generated an overwhelmingly positive response from members and recruits. Each recruitment event averaged over 200 entries from across the USA. Monthly National qualifiers on average received over 150 entries for each qualifier from across the USA.
“We were shocked how quickly people adapted to online participation, particularly the masters contestants. Everyone really embraced the virtual competitions” said Suzy.
Most importantly the events have provided members with the ability to engage with their sport during covid. Additionally USA Weightlifting are also now able to offer qualifying and recruiting events to members and non-members in remote locations that would not have had the ability to compete even in non-covid times.
The benefit to members to continue to engage with their sporting passion means that the risk of losing members from the sport has been dramatically reduced.
Such has been the enthusiasm of members and recruits to be involved in these virtual events, USA Weightlifting plan to continue to include these virtual competitions for the foreseeable future, even post-covid.
“We were shocked how quickly people adapted to online participation, particularly the masters contestants. Everyone really embraced the virtual competitions”
SUZY SANCHEZ,
Director, Culture, Community & Outreach for USA Weightlifting