There are but a few days until the end of the year and, as always, we like to look back on some of the important Nacsport happenings that occurred during this strange, strange year of 2020.
There can be no arguing that this has been an exceptionally difficult year, almost entirely due to the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone involved in the sports industry has been affected, from clubs, professional athletes and competitions to private business such as Nacsport who are dedicated to this sector.
Yes, it’s been a hard old year, but luckily we’ve been able to weather the storm, mostly due to our exceptional growth in previous years, giving us a buffer against the onslaught. Although it’s true that the pandemic put paid to many of our plans for the year, we’ve worked extremely hard to overcome the difficulties presented by this most unusual of years and, we’re proud to say, we reach the end of 2020 steering the same course, with more than desire than ever to continue our growth in the new year.
New Personnel and New Premises
It seems like a lifetime ago, but back at the beginning of the year, we welcomed five new colleagues into the Nacsport fold: From left to right, Baltasar in Development, Alinor in Administration, Duncan in Communications (me!), Enrique in Sales and Mario in Development (not pictured).
These new team members joined the team just before the waste material hit the rotating cooling device and we all ended up in lockdown. Despite this major setback, we’re happy to say that the Nacsport team remained at full capacity throughout with no job losses. In fact, at the start of 2021, we will augment our staff team with even more new staff!
Obviously, the bigger the team, the bigger the office space needed to house them. At the beginning of the year, one of our objectives was to shift Nacsport HQ to larger premises and, even though it may not have been perfect timing, we stuck to our guns and moved to a brand new office at the beginning of October.
More and Better Communication with Users
Last year, we made a commitment to improving communication with you the user. We wanted to open new channels and fill them with content tailored to your needs. We believe we have succeeded. Here’s what we’ve done:
• Opened four new communication channels. During 2020, we launched two new channels on Telegram (in English and Spanish), a Twitter account for Nacsport America and another for Nacsport Japan.
• New formats. Webinars, ebooks, infographics, video nuggets...these are just some examples of new, innovative formats we have experimented with this year in order to adapt to the current climate and meet the needs of our community.
• Respecting the demands of the public. We decided to talk less about ourselves this year and focus more on the content you wanted to see. Articles about the video analysis sector, guest blogs by experts in the field and analysis of some of the big coaches, teams and matches in the sporting calendar.
As a result of this added communication, we’re proud to confirm that our website has seen a 50% increase in visits when compared to 2019. In addition, this November broke all Nacsport records for the number of visitors to our humble website.
This is, of course, all down to you the user. We create content just for you, so thank you for consuming it!
More Training and Education
This 2020 was also the year of courses and training in video analysis.
Internally, we continue to work on increasing the number of Official Nacsport Courses available.
We launched new Starter Courses in Basketball and hockey, to join our already established Football course. We also launched Advanced Courses in each of these three sports. All these courses are offered in English and Spanish.
In addition, a Starter Course in French was let loose a few short weeks ago at the end of November.
We reached innumerable agreements with other organisations, educational establishments and individuals to actively participate in video analysis and scouting training.
During the month of March, we granted free temporary Nacsport licenses to university students around the world so that their education wasn’t interrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown.
Throughout the toughest months of confinement, we prepared a series of free webinars so that our users could learn a little bit more about our software and explore new functionality and tools in depth. These were very well received.
More Synergy Inside and Outside the Software
In 2019, we predicted that 2020 would be the year of data. This will continue into 2021, so perhaps it’s better to talk about this being the data era. And, although the crisis has slowed us down somewhat, we continue to build both commercial and economic bridges with other companies in the sector to improve the amount and quality of the data you can glean from Nacsport.
Particularly celebrated by our community of video analysts the world over was the commercial agreement we reached with InStat, one of the largest sports data providers in the world. We made it easier for new users to access both platforms and take their analysis to the next level.
In addition, we also showed the benefits of data visualisation programs such as Power BI and Tableau. We continue to grow our synergy with other programs, tools and platforms.
And Most Important of All...You!
All of the above is all well and good, but it would all be for naught without the important asset in the Nacsport arsenal...you.
To you, dear readers, we can only thank you from the bottom of our hearts for the support and trust you placed in us throughout the year. We know that 2020 has been a complicated and horrible year for many of you but we’ve felt that, far from abandoning us, you’ve been there more than ever. In the same way, we’ve tried to up our game especially for you.
From now on, we should try to put this difficult year behind us and face the new year with optimism and, with the best will in the world, continue to grow together.
We’re already in the process of planning 2021, evaluating all possible and outcomes but, as always, putting you at the forefront of our thoughts.
Happy New Year to You All!
