Case Summary
As Manager, Digital Media at Sport Calgary, I was responsible for the communication and website management for Sport Calgary's marquee event, All Sport One Day.
For 2021, Sport Calgary made adjustments to All Sport One Day to ensure the safety of all participants, their families, instructors, staff, and volunteers in light of the COVID pandemic. As a result, the event was held over a month to spread out the sessions over a period of time to reduce the number of participants at session locations.
Tying into Sport Calgary's Strategic Plan
On page 42 of Sport Calgary's Strategic Plan for 2021-23, one of the organization's actions items is to "Expand the Sport Calgary web platform and web-enabled services to accelerate community engagement and dissemination of timely, relevant information to members and the general public (KPI: 15% growth in average monthly users as compared to 2020)".
In other words, get more people using the Sport Calgary website. In order to get more users on the website, there had to be a purpose or a reason to visit the website.
Based on feedback from past All Sport events, participants stated that registering and finding sessions was not reliable or easy. There was also a need for the schedule to be accessible on mobile devices, which was not the case at past events.
Utilizing What We Have
With Sport Calgary's website being run on the Squarespace CMS, I utilized Squarespace's Calendar Blog feature to populated every All Sport One Day session as a single events. The Archive Block, and the Search Block were used to assist users in finding the sessions that they wanted to find more easily. As Eventbrite was decided to be the tool to manage registration, the Embed Block was using to integrate Eventbrite's Embedded Checkout API, completing the streamlined registration process for sessions.
Separating the Registration Process
Historically, Eventbrite was used to manage both the communication as well as the registration process for each session. This year, we separated the process between Squarespace and Eventbrite.
For each session, we utilized Eventbrite's Embedded Checkout API to provide a registration experience that took place natively on each registration page. However, all the communication was managed using Squarespace, which made updating the information more streamlined and centralized.