Angel City Sports' mission is to provide free adaptive sport opportunities to kids, adults and Veterans with physical disabilities or visual impairments. Although we have been in operation for 6+ years, our largest struggle remains finding participants. You may wonder how this is possible, considering 15% of the population has a physical disability- meaning over one million people in Los Angeles alone! As the only organization offering free clinics, equipment and competition on a consistent basis in the Los Angeles area, you'd think we would be at capacity for all of our events.

Yet we have outpaced our demand simply due to a lack of awareness. Individuals living with physical disabilities or visual impairments often do not know they can play sports, be active, and enjoy team activities just like their non-disabled peers. We've found that even the most well-intentioned parents to primary care providers have a serious lack of awareness and education about the Paralympic Movement and adaptive sports landscape- something that must be fixed immediately!

Currently, most new participants find out about our services through word of mouth, a partner organization or a lucky Google search. We have not been able to pursue print and direct mail as often as we would like because the cost is exponentially higher than digital services and we have a very limited marketing budget.

However, in order to truly progress and impact as many lives as possible, we need to take chance out of this equation and ensure everyone one, both disabled & non-disabled, are educated and aware of the opportunities we provide.

If we had the necessary support, we would use direct mail to send information to every household within a five mile radius of our upcoming special events. Our special events include multi-sport days such as our upcoming Ventura Multi-Sport Day, or our flagship event the Angel City Games. The Multi-Sport Days are the ideal event for anyone to get acclimated and comfortable with our organization. We offer at least one sport suitable for wheelchair athletes, ambulatory athletes, and visually impaired athletes so everyone, including non-disabled individuals, can try a sport in a supportive and welcoming setting. The Angel City Games is one of the largest adaptive sports festivals in the country. Another data point that proves we need support with print and direct mail is that in 2019 we hosted over 400 athletes at the Angel City Games, however more than 50% came from outside of Southern California. This tells us that while our event is appealing and people will travel- we still do not have enough local participation. Direct mail would significantly improve this because we would ensure we would be getting visibility in front of the the entire local community which is crucial for us.

To summarize, print and direct mail helps promote the valuable message and great work our organization does because it will reach every household and give a very positive and energetic view on disability. Our print & direct mail will have kids, adults and veterans smiling and connecting with others all while being physically active. Once people see the advantages and the love in these photos, accompanied by digestible information regarding our services, their perception and limitations will be totally different and they will realize the potential and opportunities involving adaptive sports and therefore Angel City Sports are tremendous.