Sheri Endsley has spent more than 30 years of her life in the recreation field. Starting at a young age as a camp leader and a life guard, she fell in love with the outdoors and aquatics. Now, she is the District Superintendent for the City of Fort Worth.
The city serves around 850,000 residents and offers everything from big summer camps and after school programs, to adult athletic programs and educational classes. With so many programs and so many participants, having a reliable software partner for registrations, operations management and more is of the utmost importance.
After re-evaluating numerous options, Endsley and the city opted to go with ACTIVE Network’s ACTIVENet as the long-term solution.
“We actually brought in ACTIVE Network, as well as a few other companies, to interview and see what all each had to offer,” Endsley says.
“Ultimately, we decided to go with ACTIVENet because we felt it really was the best product on the market.”
She says they love the fact that it is cloud-based, allowing for immediate updates and little required involvement from the IT staff. “We get the latest and greatest and our IT is virtually hands-off.”
One of Endsley’s favorite features of ACTIVENet has been FlexReg. The city uses it for all their camps and after school programs.“FlexReg has been so beneficial for us because you can set up the registrations on the internet in a very user-friendly way,” Endsley says. “It’s so flexible in the sense that moms and dads can easily register their kids whether they are standing right in front of us, or at home on the computer.
”She says having the registrations online has increased enrollment in numerous programs. Endsley also really likes ACTIVENet Connect’s attendance tracking and sign-in/sign-out capabilities. She says that parents having the ability to quickly sign-in and sign-out their children has significantly shortened the amount of time staff spends handling check-ins, and they can instantly track how many people showed up for the programs.“I’ve actually gone to some of our facilities and seen how simple it is for parents to sign-in their kids.
Prior to ACTIVENet, it would require a lot of hands-on work from staff to get people signed-in. But the one feature of ACTIVENet that has saved her staff the most time is the ability to set up pre-requisites for classes and programs during the registration process. “With our old software, when someone would sign up for a class or program that required a certain level of membership, my staff would have to manually look into their account and see if they had the right membership,” Endsley says.
“Now, they have instant access to the full account information, and it allows for more opportunity to interact with the citizens, rather than spending time on administrative tasks. One of the unexpected benefits is the opportunity to up-sell. If the person trying to enroll doesn’t have the right level of membership, they can instantly buy it during registration. It has helped grow our revenue and has shown us an opportunity we wouldn’t have previously been able to recognize.”
In fact, Endsley says the city has seen an impressive 94% increase in online revenue since using ACTIVENet.
As for her advice to others considering using ACTIVENet?
“Honestly, I have been very pleased with ACTIVE. However, I can’t suggest enough adding technical account manager support. When we have high level issues that the normal support staff cannot handle, having the technical account manager is incredible. I always know they can help me out. Our regular account manager has also been wonderful at facilitating things, and making sure issues are resolved quickly.”
She then added, “I believe in the power of recreation to effect change in people’s live. We are here to serve the public and we need to give them the best product we have, and ACTIVE Network is our partner to help us achieve that.”
