January MarCom Updates

Hello, 2026! Check out NEW league resources and tools including our new NICA MarComDev Calendar, a call to share your league staff info, and updates regarding Canva, Iterable, and NICA photo libraries.

Note: the items below were also published in the NICA monthly running updates document.

🔥 NEW IN 2026 🔥 

🗓️ NICA MARCOMDEV CALENDAR

• • Calendar (available in month or week view)
  • Table (grouped by category and sorted in order of date)
  • Google calendar (click to add to your own calendar!)

This replaces last year’s quarter-by-quarter Google doc. This calendar will be updated regularly and shows you a LIVE high-level view of National campaigns, fundraisers, partner activations, events, and more. Reach out with questions!

👥 LEAGUE MARCOM STAFF & VOLUNTEERS

Do you have amazing new league staff or volunteers supporting communications/marketing/social media in 2026? OR do you want to connect existing staff/volunteers with MarCom support/resources?

We’re looking to know about anyone in your league who…

• Supports social media efforts
• Sends emails from Iterable
• Helps with newsletter creation
• Creates graphics or does design work for your league

ACTION: Tell us about your league MarCom staff/volunteers so we can share the MarCom Toolkit with them and add them to our NICA MarCom Slack channel.

Submit a ticket below to let us know!

✉️  ITERABLE AUTOMATED WELCOME JOURNEYS
FOR COACHES, TEAMS, & ATHLETES

Last year we debuted our onboarding journey templates →
(See our detailed info here and in the MarCom Toolkit)

ACTION: Review the welcome journey offering from NICA:

• If your league wants to take advantage of this plug-and-play template,
  submit a MarCom Help Desk ticket

• If your league is using journeys, it’s good practice to review them before every season and update graphics and messaging.
• Not sure if you’re using journeys? We have noted that some leagues who opted in previously did not set their Journeys to be published. This means that journeys were never turned on or delivered to the selected audiences. Please reach out if you would like assistance with this process!

🎨 NICA CANVA FOR TEAMS

Did you know you and your league staff can be added to NICA’s CANVA FOR TEAMS workspace? This NICA tech offering allows your league to take advantage of more Canva features without any additional costs/accounts AND it gives you DIRECT access within Canva to all NICA templates We also build you a custom brand kit, with your league logos, fonts, and colors and all NICA brand assets set up to create on-brand, pro graphics quickly and easily… (see Montana example at right) →

Submit a request to get added to our NICA Canva for Teams!

Requests fulfilled on a first-come, first-served basis.

📸 NICA PHOTO & MEDIA LIBRARY 📽️

As part of our ongoing efforts to showcase more of the NICA community, we’ve been working hard to compile NICA photo and video assets in one “library” for internal use. This system helps us keep track of the amazing photos from leagues, as well as tracking photographer names so we can provide appropriate credit.

Leagues are encouraged to share links to any photo or video assets for us to highlight via social media and other marketing channels! 

1. Review our library to see if we have photos/videos represented in your league. Find your league group and expand.
2. Once you’ve reviewed your league, complete this form IF you have any new assets to share. If possible, it’s best to share one link where we can quickly find all assets (i.e. a SmugMug account), vs individual photo album links.

Lastly, we regularly pull selects from across all leagues into our “NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL NICA!” Albums (kudos if you get the reference!) – you can view them all here.

SHE SENDS FOUNDATION: BRANDING UPDATE

It is vital that we follow the brand requirements of our amazing partners at the She Sends Foundation – please see this note with updates from their team if you are sharing any information about the NICA x She Sends Foundation grant program::

• She Sends Foundation vs. She Sends: “When referring to the She Sends Foundation in print, on social, and email communications, please continue to always use our full name. Shortening it to “She Sends” is out of compliance and we can’t use that nickname.”
• Updated logo files: There is also a slight change to their logos: “Our old logos had “foundation” in smaller font. Our edited logos have “foundation” in the same size font as She Sends. It’s important to us that our brand is consistent across all platforms, so please swap the old with the edited.”

We’ve updated the logo files to the correct version in Google Drive. If you have saved any other old logo in any locations, please delete them and use a shortcut to these files instead.

Example of updated She Sends Foundation logos:

🏆 NICA AWARDS

NICA AWARDS run Jan. 15 through feb. 1! 

Our full Awards guide for leagues is in the MarCom Toolkit, and includes a ready-to-send email template (uploaded to your Iterable account), brand assets, logo files, social media templates + copy/paste captions, AND an optional website popup.

All of these assets are designed to be simple for you to use with minimal extra work. Please review our guide!