YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties

A user experience built on interaction

Five Jars had been assessing the user requirements and the user journeys to kick off the project. Based on the collected insights of what the users of the platform desire as well as how they use the platform, our developers chose a ready-made theme of the Open Y environment and adapted it to the client’s and users’ requirements. Choosing a standard theme was crucial for the success of the project as YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap had only a limited budget available. In fact, Five Jars demonstrated its capability of balancing the challenge of various mutually exclusive benefits by choosing the most appropriate trade-offs.
 

Open Y migration that fosters quick future updates

YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties has been an enthusiastic Open Y community member. Nevertheless, without having updated their site in a long time, their web environment became out-of-date and overall error prone. In order to proceed with the migration, their entire website environment had to be updated. Only then was Five Jars able to introduce YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties to the sophisticated functionalities they requested.

For the migration to be a success, Five Jars focused on three main project objectives:

• create a system facilitating efficient and effective updates in the future
• restructure the entire website to create a sophisticated, new user experience
• enrich the website with modern functionalities such as single sign-on

Schedules for a great number of events

YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties offers, as most YMCA’s do as well, a vast range of events and activities to its members. The old website used simple listings to introduce members to the available events and activities. As this was far away from a sophisticated user interface, Five Jars developed an entirely new scheduling page which simplified the search for events tremendously. Our developers created an intuitive page which provides a great overview of the upcoming events. In addition to the overview, Five Jars implemented an extensive search and filter function which allows users to find relevant content even quicker.

A website required to service in different locations

YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties consists of many branches and locations with all of them offering unique, location-based website content such as the opening hour of the local community centers and local events. Our initial analysis showed that while there is a small number of localized content pieces, the vast majority was identical. Therefore, rather than creating distinct web pages, our developers integrated the dynamic display of location-based content by incorporating the location choice of a user. This not only was a cost-efficient decision but also one which will keep the website architecture as clear and straight-forward as possible.

Event registrations - simplified

As already said, there are many great and unique events taking place at YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties. With such an extensive choice, users may easily be overwhelmed and not find the most suitable and appropriate content for them. To mitigate that challenge, Five Jars introduced The Activity Finder.

The Activity Finder is a simple, yet powerful tool which allows users to find appropriate content based on their personal information such as their age, the day and time of the day they want to participate as well as at which location they want to participate. With this information, the tool will propose the best available option. And the best of it? Once users find an event they are interested in, they can directly register through a one-click registration process on that very page.

Single Sign-On solution and analytics power in one

Five Jars strives for complete user-centricity. From the very beginning on, we had known that the final website requires a single sign-on. Not only is a single sign-on these days the gold standard if you offer member content but it also enables a seamless integration with external service offerings. In fact, by implementing a single sign-on solution through the integration of TractionRec, we not only harnessed the power of SalesForce (on which TractionRec is built) but also advanced analytics opportunities for our client. Five Jars chose this integration due to its enormous impact across the entire website.

A migration for the future

Five Jars migrated and overhauled the existing website of YMCA of Pierce and Kitsap Counties to exploit the power of modern day functionalities such as single sign-on and advanced analytics. One of the overarching goals, however, was to simplify the updating of the site in the future. As our client is a community non-profit organization, reducing costs is a must. Therefore, Five Jars created synergies wherever possible and created an intuitive backend to simplify these processes in the future. In addition to that, we migrated the entire content onto the new website and demonstrated the analytics capabilities to our client.

Five Jars is truly a driver of success.
Kimberly Schulz, Sr Experience Dir, YMCA of Pierce & Kitsap Counties