About Youthtown

Youthtown provides after-school care, holiday programmes, youth hubs, outdoor education, and sports opportunities for thousands of young people at locations across New Zealand.

The Challenge

Youthtown had been using an American-based booking system but was concerned that the drop-off rate of people during sign-up was too high. Additionally, there was no integration with the accounting system and there was no ability for parents/caregivers to self-manage or change bookings themselves after they had been made. The result was hours each week of wasted administrative effort for Youthtown to manage bookings and reconcile transactions. Additionally, the Youthtown website content management system was cumbersome and difficult to update.

Youthtown engaged Sporty.co.nz to examine the user journey of parents/caregivers and also consider the challenges experienced by Youthtown programme delivery teams and the head office finance team. The desire was to improve the experience of parents/caregivers and staff with a more seamless and frictionless integration between website, online bookings, e-commerce, CRM, and bookkeeping systems.

The Solution - 1. Website Builder

The first task was to refresh the Youthtown website using the Sporty website builder (CMS). The Sporty CMS is a ‘what-you-see-is-what-you-get’ (WYSIWYG) system that supports inline editing of pages and drag & drop widgets for content. It's so easy to use that Youthtown staff were able to perform subsequent iterations of the entire website design and content without needing further support from the team at Sporty.

The Solution - 2. Booking System

The next task was to create the online forms for people to book programmes. For this, Youthtown used the online form builder from Sporty. The form builder lets you add your own question fields along with products and pricing. The team at Sporty worked with Youthtown to extend the form builder to display a calendar of booking options, support waitlists, add new discount rules, and allow people to see their transaction history and modify their own bookings.

The Sporty system uses magic links to avoid the need for people to login. The user experience is simpler and less confusing, resulting in less drop-off of people through the registration process.

The outcome is a system that makes it easy for Youthtown to offer programme bookings where it sets the dates and times of programmes at each location, along with the number of spaces available for each timeslot, and pricing. The modern, mobile-responsive calendar further streamlines the process and ensures people are charged correctly for the options they choose. It even updates account balances automatically if parents/caregivers return later and modify their bookings.

Attendance tracking is included in the solution. Youthtown can let people sign-in/sign-out the children and record attendance via a touchscreen kiosk or through a programme leader marking attendance on their mobile during a roll call. All records automatically update back to the central customer relationship management (CRM) system.

The Solution - 3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The final piece of the puzzle was SuperCRM, the customer relationship management system that comes out-of-the box from Sporty.

• SuperCRM keeps everyone’s contact details, notes, history, and information all in one place.
• It lets Youthtown easily send a bulk email to people who signed up for programmes in the past with an invitation to book a future programme. Each email contains a unique ‘magic link’ that a parent/caregiver can click to autofill their child’s details for the new programme without needing to login.
• All bookings are automatically visible in SuperCRM on the timeline of each individual.
• Youthtown can easily filter the database to see just those people who attended a particular programme.
• Sporty integrates with Poli, Stripe, and Debit Success to process payments directly to the customers’ account.