YMCA of the North

A project with a multitude of goals

The project's goal was to complete the necessary website development, front-end improvements, and back-end enhancements. A more sophisticated user experience across the online platform as well as a streamlined content editing experience for the client’s content creators was sought. Five Jars identified the diversity of requirements and put together a broad team of digital strategists, developers, quality engineers, UI/UX experts, and project managers to capture all the requirements during the project review phase and effectively implement the required functionality.
 
The project's objectives were to:

• migrate current webpages and platforms to the Open Y content editing experience environment
• integrate third-party apps
• establish and exploit efficiencies across the platform
• migrate legacy content types to the new Open Y content editing experience

Content management system as the vocal point

The YMCA of the North oversees and manages the web content for more than 20 locations with over 10,000 members. The amount of new stuff being uploaded on a daily basis is massive. As a result, having a good content management system is crucial. Five Jars recognized the CMS system's critical role and examined its overall structure, proposing essential improvements. Our developers recognized the potential for process automation across the YMCA of the North's operations.
 
Our proactive approach led to an extensive degree of process automation which was not only within the provided budget but will also save YMCA of the North significant overhead costs in the future.

Integrations of third-party applications

Five Jars has a lot of expertise integrating third-party solutions. We are frequently the first agency to implement new initiatives in the Open Y ecosystem. Prior to collaborating with us, the YMCA of the North's process for purchasing and registering a personal or small group training session required more than three steps and multiple, manual data entry tasks. This raised not just the error rate and reduced the satisfaction of its users and members, but also increased overhead costs considerably. Five Jars recognized the importance of a streamlined registration process.

The aim was simple: automate the process and enable customers to be independent. First, however, our developers mapped the user journeys and comprehended all steps necessary to buy and register for a personal or small group training to understand the entire process thoroughly. Users may now buy and book any type of training effortlessly and seamlessly online thanks to our solution, which effectively eliminates the requirement for a YMCA of the North staff member to complete the transaction. Five Jars boosted customer satisfaction by empowering users, reduced non-used training sessions due to no-shows, increased the productivity of our client’s back office, and, ultimately, lowered costs.

Multiple project objectives can be solved with a single solution.

Five Jars makes every effort to keep project costs to an absolute minimum. We don't believe in overcharging and hold ourselves to a high level of transparency and honesty. That is why we build tools and integration interfaces that solve multiple problems at the same time.

George Wellbeing Center

As a result of the successful integration of Personify Corp and MindBodyOnline, we used the same interface to automate, besides personal and small group training, also the George Wellbeing Center's service offerings. Massages, health coaching, nutrition coaching, meditation coaching, and acupuncture are just a few of the services available for online booking.
 
While the fundamental procedure of booking wellbeing services is similar to that of personal and small group training, the nature of the service offering presented significant obstacles. Acupuncture treatments and other wellness services demand more customer interaction than personal and small group training. Indeed, one of our developers' key goals was to reassure users that they were selecting the correct service through a sophisticated user interface design.

Reservation for a family camp 

In addition, Personify Corp integration was used to re-design the family camp reservation page and establish a consistent user experience throughout the entire website. The new camp reservation page's main focus was a comprehensive search and filter tool. The YMCA of the North and its affiliates run a variety of camps, making it ultimately difficult to choose the ideal one without a comprehensive review. We designed a search function that filters across all fields and allows users to use several search terms at the same time to provide the most targeted search results possible. Our developers increased the user experience by implementing a process which keeps users and their desires at the center.

Simplify the scholarship application process

YMCA of the North is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a welcoming, accessible, and open environment. Need-based financial assistance is available to make their services more accessible to low-income households. Prior working with Five Jars, they calculated personal pricings by using an extensive spreadsheet-based calculation tool. This task required an extensive amount of time as all of the information provided by the applicant had to be manually included. Furthermore, the procedure of awarding financial assistance was not centralized nor consistent among the numerous subgroups of YMCA of the North.

Five Jars sketched out the complete process of reviewing an application and proposed an automated tool that applicants may fill out and staff members can enrich with additional information. The personal price will eventually be estimated based on all given inputs and ensures a consistent standard across the entire organisation.

Digital signage to create an offline user experience matching the online one

Five Jars knows that user experience does go beyond online presences. We believe that offline and online experiences must be thoroughly aligned to create a strong and lasting brand awareness and customer satisfaction. That is why we have implemented a customized digital signage solution which simplifies the finding of facilities across the facilities of our client.

Want to read more about our digital signage solution? Read our separate case study here. But the best things first –our entire digital signage solution is available on GitHub. Interested in what that looks like? Check it out right here.

Video automation to speed up content adding

Uploading new video content onto the Virtual Y platform of YMCA of the North requires a considerable amount of manual labor. As the required steps are repetitive and will not differ from video to video, process automation is the solution to implement. Read more about how cumbersome the process was prior to the solution provided by our developers here. 

Results:

• 8h

Our automation tool saves 8h+ a week and decreased costs considerably

• Bottleneck? Gone

We recognized the operational bottleneck and mitigated the impact through a tailored software tool more than tripled throughput rate

• Open Source

Yes. Also our video automation tool is available for you to use. Great, isn’t it?

Multi-participant registration made easy

The YMCA of the North registration process prior partnering up with Five Jars was everything else but user-friendly. Each registration was able to register one person only. Signing up your entire family was, therefore, a time consuming exercise which led to a high level of frustration. 

Our developers are known to put user experience at the heart of every project. By doing so, they recognized this pain point and developed a new registration process which allows multi-participant registration in the most easy manner. In order to achieve this, we integrated Personify Corp and MindBody into the YMCA of the North platform. 

By integrating leading third-party tools, we not only simplified the registration process for the participants but also accounted for the increasing need for insights of YMCA of the North as both integrations foster the analytics driven insights generation at YMCA of the North.

An extraordinarily extensive project

Five Jars has known from the start that this project will be challenging. First, the size of the website of YMCA of the North was extraordinarily large. Their vast network and impressive traffic figures indicated that the project would test our developers and their skills thoroughly. Secondly, the budget constraint was predominant. Third, the diversity of project objectives required a diverse team working towards the same goal.

Our team has a lot of experience with agile project management and offers excellent communication skills. These factors contributed to the establishment of a transparent and open environment in which Five Jars and YMCA of the North could interact and partner as efficiently as possible. Aside from that, our strategic approach allowed us to meet deadlines in the most cost-effective manner possible.

We aren't finished yet, even though we fulfilled the project objectives. YMCA of the North was so satisfied with our work that they awarded us an ongoing maintenance and improvement contract. We are now able to update the website on a more continuous and future-oriented basis. Want to know more about how we performed? Read our review on Clutch.io.