Stonington Youth Football & Cheer

Where we stand

The new site is built, live, and owned by the program. The old site is archived in full, so nothing is lost.

The home page sends each visitor down one of two paths: New to the Bears for prospective families, and Current Families & Players for everyone already in. The new family path leads with Free to Play and a one-tap TeamSnap signup. The rest of the site covers the Four Pillars, a coaching directory, the board with photos and contacts, the meeting schedule, the by-laws, evergreen Sponsors and Fundraisers pages, and a privacy policy. Sponsors appear in a banner on every page and in a roster by level, each linking to their own site.

Ads are running. Three campaigns are live on Facebook and Instagram today - one for football, one for flag, and one for cheer. Each targets parents in Stonington and North Stonington by zip code. It is a deliberate, small audience. Most people in the area will not see these ads, which is the point - every dollar goes toward families most likely to sign up.

Before the ads could mean anything, the site had to exist. Getting the website live first - with tracking, a Meta Pixel, and conversion events built in - is what gives these ads real intelligence. Without it, a click is just a click. With it, we can see who spent real time on the site, who clicked the registration link, and teach Facebook to find more people like them. That is why we moved fast to get the site done first.

One heads-up: the domain transfer to a new registrar is still working its way through and is taking longer than expected. The site may go briefly offline in the next day or two while that finalizes. It will come back up quickly, and once it does, the setup is permanent.

The Ad Library link above is public and requires no Facebook account. It may take a day or two for the ads to appear there after launching.

If you follow the Stonington Bears Facebook page, you will most likely not see these ads - and that is by design. Ads reaching people who are not already in the program are worth more than ads going to people who already know us. Excluding page followers keeps the budget focused on new families. That exclusion will be fully switched on in a week or two. For now, some followers may still see the ads, which is not a problem - their early likes and shares help push the ads a little further into the feed before we tighten the targeting.

The budget is $5 a day, about $150 a month. The timing is late in the school year, and that is worth saying plainly. These ads alone will not fill a roster before fall. What they will do is start building an audience - parents who visit the site, read it, and click the registration link. That data feeds everything that comes next.

This summer the plan is to rotate in content around practice schedules and program life, and shift to ads that target families who have already shown interest in the site. The pixel tracking and audience infrastructure are already in place to do that without starting over. The early work is done. The engine is on.

The full checklist is below, marked done or still open, and updates live as we work.

Brandon
fullsent.