At officepoolstop.com we offer an easy and free way to run your company office pool. Our goal is to make life easy for you as the office pool manager and for all your co-workers and friends who join in on the fun. The following is a step-by-step guide on how to get started with your office football pool.
- Decide on the type of football pool
We offer a variety of pickem football pools, survivor pools, and confidence pools, for both pro and college football. If you can’t decide, the most common office football pool choice would be to run an NFL pick’em league. - Create the football office pool
Creating a pool is easy. Assuming you want to run a pickem pool, just go to the Create League page and select Pickem Pool ( either NFL or college). You’ll then provide very basic settings for your league, such as the name of the pool and the password for it. You will then be required to create a login profile if you haven’t already (all players who use the site will need a login, of course). After the initial Create League page, you’ll be taken to a page where you can adjust the default league settings. To keep things simple, scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the Create League button and accept the default settings for now. You can always change the settings later. Your office football league is now created on our website! - Put a message on your football pool’s home page
The first page players see when they login to your football pool is your pool’s home page. We provide a default ‘Welcome to the 1st Annual XYZ League’ message with some other minor details, but it would be better for you to put your own touches on it. You can edit the page via a link toward the upper right of the page. See this help desk article for details: Editing Your Office Pool Home Page | HelpDesk | OfficePoolStop.com - Customize your office football pool’s look & feel
We have an optional inexpensive premium ADD-ON called Branding where you can change most of the colors of the pool such as the background and navigation links. You can also upload your own graphic logo that will appear on the top of the page. If you go full Premium Mode to remove ads, you can also place an image in the far right column where an ad would otherwise normally appear. - Set the pick deadline for your football pool
The default pick deadline for players is Sunday at 11:00am MST. This works for most managers, but if you want a different deadline you have numerous options. One popular choice is to make the deadline the kickoff for each game. To change when your league’s pick deadline is, navigate to your settings page at Manager -> League Settings. We have a help desk article on the deadline that we think you’ll find useful: Pool League Deadline | HelpDesk | OfficePoolStop.com - Add enticing football pool bonus points
To enable bonus points for your football pool, navigate to Manager -> League Settings. For a football pick’em league, you can for example enable Bye Week, which is a cool feature that removes a player’s worst week in case they forget to turn in their picks one week. Another football pickem pool feature you should consider is the bonus points section. You can make it where players earn extra points for successfully picking underdogs. You can also enable key games that allows players to earn extra credit for a handful of games they mark as ‘key’. You can find further details in our blog post NFL Pick’em Key Games Feature, or at our help desk article: Key Games Feature (officepoolstop.com). - Invite your co-workers!
Its now time to invite players to your office football pool. Simply go to Manager -> Invite Friends and enter in emails of those you would like to invite. You can also use the pool join information on that page to send from your own email program such as Gmail. You’ll receive an email each time someone joins your office pool. - Kick back and relax!
At this point you could just fold your arms and kick back in your recliner and let us do the rest. 🙂 We’ll send automatic pick reminders, process picks submitted by your co-workers, and tally results as they happen. Our Standings pages are very detailed with lots of fun data. Not just your standard points earned, but other detailed stats such as margin of victory, winning %, etc. We even have a chart on player ranking trends over the course of the season.
The above step-by-step guide will get every office football pool manager out of the gate and running. For those managers who want a more active role, there are many features such as the ability to select which games each week are on the football pick sheet, which games are eligible to be selected as a key game by players, etc. Manager can also use our site to manage player accounts and player status (such as setting a player inactive), submit picks for players who otherwise are unable to, update headlines weekly that appear above the standings, etc. If you wish to find out more, please try any of our football tours, and check out our videos on how to create a league and how to run your league from your manager control panel.
If you need any help at all please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at the OfficePoolStop Help Desk. We have plenty of articles and guides, and you can also submit a ticket with any question you have and we’ll respond promptly! Good luck and most importantly, have fun!
