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The Real Outreach Plan

#outreach#build-in-public#community

Why the First Plan Wasn't Good Enough

The original outreach plan had the right structure — concentric circles from local to national — but it was thin. Generic organization names. No real people. No social media strategy. No event tactics. No grant databases. No CRM recommendations. A plan you couldn't actually execute.

So we rebuilt it from scratch with three parallel research streams: the full San Diego youth soccer landscape (every club, league, tournament, field, and parent community), named individuals in the reform movement (with real contact channels), and modern grassroots organizing tactics (social media, events, grants, tracking tools).

What Changed

The new plan has 8 sections and ~2,500 words of actionable content:

  1. San Diego Landscape — 15+ target clubs ranked by alignment, 6 key facilities, and every online community where SD soccer parents talk (SD Soccer Talk, BigSoccer, SoCal Soccer Mom, Facebook groups, Reddit)

  2. Named Contacts — Tom Farrey (Project Play, testified before Congress), Dennis Crowley (Stockade FC, still planning free-to-play youth programs for 2026), Skye Eddy (Soccer Parenting), John O'Sullivan (Changing the Game Project), Gary & Brian Kleiban (3four3), Chattanooga FC board members, Detroit City FC's Sean Mann

  3. Social Media Playbook — Platform priorities (Facebook > Instagram > Reddit > TikTok > X), content pillars, posting cadence, email strategy with MailerLite

  4. Event-Based Outreach — Free Saturday morning clinics (the highest ROI tactic), tournament presence at Surf Cup and Albion Cup, PTA presentations, tryout season counter-programming

  5. Grants & Funding — U.S. Soccer Foundation (Safe Places to Play, program grants), Cal South Foundation ($600K+ distributed), Laureus Sport for Good ($33M invested), Nike Community Impact Fund, San Diego Foundation ($10K-$100K), plus grant discovery tools (Instrumentl, GrantWatch, Zeffy)

  6. Operations — Airtable CRM for tracking conversations, ambassador program structure, founding member cooperative tier

  7. Press & Media — 6 story angles matched to timing, local media contacts (SoccerNation, Union-Tribune, KPBS, Voice of San Diego, TV stations), podcast guest targets (Way of Champions, 3four3 FM, SoccerNation Podcast, TopDrawerSoccer Show)

  8. 16-Week Execution Calendar — Week-by-week checkboxes from "create Facebook Group" through "first training sessions begin"

The Key Insight

No one has built a legally cooperative, community-owned youth soccer club in the US. The pieces exist separately — Chattanooga's equity model, Stockade's open-source approach, AYSO's volunteer model, Detroit City's supporter ownership with youth programs — but no one has assembled them into a youth-specific cooperative.

That's the gap. That's why the outreach plan matters. We're not just reaching out to get advice — we're assembling the first version of something that doesn't exist yet.

What's Next

Week 1 starts now: set up Facebook, Instagram, MailerLite, and the Airtable tracker. Join the forums. Start showing up at fields. The plan exists. Now execute it.

The full plan is at /landscape/outreach-plan.

Related reading: