Partner
SHUNT
Australian sport research and education company that benchmarks how 30,000+ sporting organisations use social media, then teaches clubs comms, membership growth, and sponsorship.
About SHUNT
SHUNT is an Australian research and education company for sport, run by Shunt Creative Pty Ltd and founded by Stu Williams, a former sports photojournalist. Its argument is short: sport doesn’t need more information, it needs better knowledge transfer. SHUNT takes what it learns from watching how Australian sport communicates and turns it into courses, diagnostics, and advisory work for community clubs, state and national bodies, sponsors, boards, and councils.
At the centre is a dataset SHUNT describes as Australia’s largest on community sport communications. It tracks more than 30,000 sporting organisation profiles, built on a list SHUNT spent 18 months compiling during the Covid years: 30,000 community clubs across 75 sports. From it come the numbers most committees never see about their own club: followers, posts published, engagement, and post performance — engagement divided by posts, which tells you whether a club is posting well rather than just often. SHUNT’s 2023 benchmarks put the median club Facebook audience at 946 followers, and found 8% of sampled clubs didn’t post at all that year. Its 2025 research found only about 5% of community club posts ask anyone to join, register, or get involved.
Every quarter SHUNT benchmarks thousands of community sports organisations and publishes the SHUNT Performance Awards, sport by sport, for audience growth, content creation, fan engagement, and content quality. The Q2 2026 rankings covered clubs in tennis, volleyball, surf life saving, Little Athletics Victoria, and sailing, and Australian Sailing published the sailing results for its affiliated clubs. The point, in SHUNT’s words, is not only to show who is leading but to help every club understand the part social media plays in participation, community, and commercial success.
In July 2026 SHUNT launched an eLearning platform with four self-paced courses: Optimising Club Comms, Selling Your Sport, the Sponsorship Playbook, and Train the Sponsor, which is written for the local businesses that back clubs rather than the clubs themselves. The Sponsorship Playbook opens on why clubs under-price their sponsorships, then works through rights, valuation tools, packaging, proposals, delivery, and renewal. Alongside the courses sit free diagnostics, each under five minutes, that benchmark a club’s comms, membership growth, or sponsorship capability and return personalised recommendations.
The partnership
SHUNT and TidyHQ work on different halves of the same problem. SHUNT tells a club how its audience is performing — how many people follow it, how often it posts, how much of that turns into engagement — and teaches the committee how to turn that attention into members and into a sponsorship price it can defend. TidyHQ is where the people behind those numbers are kept: financial and lapsed members, volunteers, and sponsors as their own contact type, with renewals, sponsor invoices, and sponsorship income tracked in the club’s books, and the email side of club communications sent to the right list. SHUNT does not hold your members or send your newsletters. TidyHQ does not measure your Facebook or Instagram. A club using both walks into a sponsor meeting with its social reach from SHUNT and its member numbers from TidyHQ.
- TidyHQ points clubs that want to understand their social media performance, or learn how to price and pitch sponsorship, to SHUNT’s courses and free diagnostics. TidyHQ doesn’t measure social media; SHUNT does.
- Clubs working through SHUNT’s membership and sponsorship material run the day-to-day side in TidyHQ: membership renewals and lapsed-member reminders, sponsors kept as their own contact type, sponsorship income tracked as its own category, and member emails.
- Mutual customers are supported on both sides: SHUNT for social media insight and club capability; TidyHQ for the club’s members, money, and member emails.
Where your social numbers meet your member records
Pricing the sponsorship tiers before season launch
A football club’s sponsorship coordinator works through SHUNT’s Sponsorship Playbook — rights, valuation, packaging, proposal — and builds tiers the committee can defend instead of rolling over last year’s price. The audience figures in the pitch come from SHUNT’s benchmarks: followers, engagement, and post performance against clubs in the same sport. Once a business signs, TidyHQ keeps it as a sponsor contact, and the invoice and payment sit in the club’s finances under a sponsorship category, so the treasurer can see which sponsors have paid before the AGM.
The “join the family” page of the proposal
SHUNT’s sponsorship proposal layout gives a whole page to “Join the family”, because access to a club’s people is one of the main reasons a local business sponsors. The social following is half of that audience. The other half is the people who pay to belong: financial members, their families, and the volunteers. TidyHQ keeps that number current from membership records that update as renewals come in, so the proposal quotes this season’s members, not last season’s guess.
Registration season, and the post that asks people to join
SHUNT found only about 5% of community club posts ask anyone to register or get involved, and its Selling Your Sport course is about turning that attention into sign-ups. The post is the start. The link in it has to land somewhere a new member can join and pay in one go. For a TidyHQ club that is the online membership form, and the new member appears in the club’s contact list straight away, with no paper form for the registrar to retype.
Facebook for the fans, email for the financial members
SHUNT’s research shows clubs adding followers while posting less and earning more engagement per post, and its Optimising Club Comms course helps a committee decide what its social channels are for. Some messages don’t belong in a feed. The AGM notice, the renewal reminder, and the venue change for presentation night go to financial members by email from TidyHQ Communications, filtered by membership status, with replies landing in one shared inbox the whole committee can see.
Train the sponsor, then look after them
SHUNT’s Train the Sponsor course is written for the local business: how community sponsorship compares with other marketing, what realistic value looks like, and how to run it day to day. A club can send it to a new sponsor along with the agreement. Then the club delivers its side: sponsor logos and links on a TidyHQ club website, and a pass code on the presentation night tickets so sponsor guests get their seats without anyone keeping a list on paper.
Common questions
SHUNT is an Australian sport research and education company that benchmarks how sporting organisations use social media and turns that research into online courses and free diagnostics for community clubs, sporting bodies, and sponsors. It is run by Shunt Creative Pty Ltd, was founded by Stu Williams, and tracks more than 30,000 sporting organisation profiles. Its website is shunt.com.au.
SHUNT measures a club’s social media audience and activity: followers and follower growth, posts published, engagement (reactions, comments, and shares), and post performance, which is engagement divided by posts. It benchmarks thousands of community sports organisations every quarter and publishes the results, sport by sport, as the SHUNT Performance Awards.
Yes. SHUNT’s Sponsorship Playbook course teaches community clubs a repeatable sponsorship system covering rights, valuation tools, packaging, proposals, delivery, and renewal, and its free Sponsorship capability diagnostic benchmarks how a club handles sponsorship today. Its Train the Sponsor course is written for the businesses that sponsor clubs.
As listed in October 2026, SHUNT courses cost A$50 to A$145 each: Train the Sponsor A$50, Selling Your Sport A$55, Sponsorship Playbook A$95, and Optimising Club Comms A$145. The Club Growth Bundle of Optimising Club Comms, Selling Your Sport, and the Sponsorship Playbook is A$245. The diagnostics are free.
SHUNT and TidyHQ do different jobs, so a club can use both without overlap. SHUNT tells a club how its social media audience is performing and teaches comms, membership growth, and sponsorship. TidyHQ is the club’s membership and admin system: members, renewals, sponsors as contacts, events, payments, finances, and member emails. SHUNT does not store members or send emails, and TidyHQ does not measure social media.
No, there is no direct integration between SHUNT and TidyHQ. SHUNT works from social media data and TidyHQ from the club’s own member records, so nothing needs to sync between them. A club uses SHUNT’s benchmarks and courses alongside the membership and sponsor records it keeps in TidyHQ.
Yes. TidyHQ keeps sponsors as their own contact type alongside members, volunteers, and coaches, tracks sponsorship income as its own category in the club’s finances, and lets a club show sponsor logos and links on a TidyHQ website. TidyHQ does not value a sponsorship or measure a sponsor’s social media exposure; that is the work SHUNT teaches.
SHUNT works with community clubs, state and national sporting organisations, sponsors, boards, and local councils, according to its website. Australian Sailing published SHUNT’s Q2 2026 Performance Awards for its affiliated clubs, and SHUNT’s quarterly awards have recognised clubs such as Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club, Chequers Volleyball Club, and Moruya Surf Life Saving Club.
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