Running The Very Good Email Company keeps me busy, but I’ve always got at least one other project on the go. Right now, the one I’m most excited about is Open Golf Events — a free, searchable directory of golf competitions open to the public across the UK.
I’ve been playing golf for over 40 years, and I love playing at different courses. Many years ago, I discovered a golf tour that I could play on which, while expensive, gave me lots of opportunities to travel and experience other golf courses. A recent injury sidelined my golfing aspirations for a while, and made me consider how I can help other golfers to find open competitions to play in, maybe with a slightly smaller budget!
Many golf courses around the world, and particularly the UK, hold regular open competitions. While they are good at running competitions and managing golf courses, they have little time for maintaining and updating websites, and between them create a hodge-podge of event listings in different formats. There are a few directory sites, particularly in the UK, which are either behind paywalls or simply terrible or abandoned.
With the latest developments in AI from both a computer coding point of view, and its ability to interpret data, it made me wonder if I could do a better job without employing an army of people. Turns out, I could, so I did…
What Open Golf Events does
Open Golf Events brings golf competition listings from clubs across the UK into one place. Golfers can search by location, date, and format to find events they’d never have stumbled across otherwise. For clubs, it’s a free way to fill their fields with players beyond their own membership.
It’s still growing – we’re adding features all the time – but the core is solid and it’s genuinely useful if you play.
Where email comes in
Getting this right from an email deliverability perspective has been a real challenge – and frankly, a fascinating one. Golf club administrators are heavily concentrated on Microsoft 365 and Outlook, which are notoriously aggressive with new sending domains. Making sure competition notification emails actually land in inboxes – rather than junk folders – has meant applying everything I know about SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and sender reputation. We’ve also been able to test MailCore Send from a customer perspective.
In a way, Open Golf Events is a live proving ground. The same deliverability principles I apply there are exactly what we help customers with here at The Very Good Email Company every day.
It is also a chance to start something with a clean sheet, and has provided a valuable learning process which may be reflected soon in a control panel or webmail interface that you use.
Worth a bookmark
If you play golf, head over to opengolfevents.com and take a look. It’s free to use, free to list your club’s events, and it’s only going to get better.
