The Basalt Recreation Department serves Basalt, Aspen, and many other small communities within a 20-mile radius of the Colorado town via an Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA).
The recreation department, which has no central office, runs up to 25 programs for kids in any given season, including tennis, basketball, baseball, soccer, sailing, cross-country skiing, archery, and art, using an out-of-control paper process.
Overwhelmed by paper and inefficiency
With no central office, participants were forced to register and pay at the Town Hall Finance department or mail in their registrations. Dorothy had to drive across town to pick them up. She then had to process each one manually on a credit card machine. The paperwork filled whole filing cabinets. Occasionally, some would get lost. At the end of the season, she had to empty out the file cabinet and store the registration forms in notebooks.
“The paper was outrageous,” she said. “And the time spent was just insane.”
Calming the Chaos
In 2009, Dorothy automated with Thriva, ACTIVE Network’s first camp management software. She needed something powerful and effective to streamline her overwhelming administrative process, but because she is the sole employee, she needed it to be lightweight. Thriva revolutionized registration and calmed the chaos.
When Dorothy upgraded to the new web-based ACTIVEWorks® | Camp & Class Manager, she found many more innovations that simplified her job:
- Parents love the convenience of online registration and payment.
- Accessibility from anywhere is game-changing.
- Remote report access is available to the town’s Financial Director without placing added workload on Dorothy.
- Targeted Communications sent from within the software always yield an immediate upswing in registrations and fill rates when they contain direct registration links and are sent to relevant participants.
- Personalizing newsletters and emails for different sports is simple.
Upgrade Pays Off
Dorothy says that using ACTIVE online registration software brought about “dramatic change” in the recreation department’s operations:
- 90% reduction in time spent processing registrations
- Only about 100 paper registrations in the last three years, continuing to decrease+Increased fill rate
- 100% increase in annual revenue since before ACTIVE
“Make the Switch!”
Efficiency in operating the recreation department has allowed Dorothy the time to build up program offerings. And Camp & Class Manager enables her to promote her programs through free, targeted marketing which, in turn, increases participation and revenue.For anyone still using Thriva, she highly recommends making the switch to Camp & Class Manager.
“I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t,” she says. “It’s so much better.”
