Digital Marketing
Case Study:
The Arena Sports Academy
Providing Growth Opportunities for Siouxland Youth
The Arena Mission
This digital marketing case study focuses on VEA Technologies developing user-friendly tools that put our clients ahead of the competition. The Arena Sports Academy is a sports facility in Sioux City, Iowa that seeks to develop Siouxland youth athletes both physically and mentally with the goal of building character, creating team players and enriching their community through the values of athletics.
They strive to deliver top of the line training through elite coaches, trainers, and world-class facilities.
Making the Mission Happen
Offering so many different services in one facility can make it challenging to manage, schedule and coordinate all the various classes and events that take place. An easy-to-use online solution for everything from camps to tournament signups was what the Arena team needed. To accommodate all of the functionality required for this website, we chose to build the backend using open source .Net Platform. This allowed us to integrate all of the custom widgets for accepting payments, scheduling and even tracking rounds of multiple types of tournaments.
Front End – User Experience
When an athlete or parent creates an account in the system, they gain the ability to input the standard user setting that you would expect to see in any typical user account. Where the experience become more unique is that they also have the ability to add family members to their account, as well as create subscriptions to recurring events that they wish to participate in on an ongoing basis.
Tournament Sign Up
The top navigation on the site makes it easy for users to find the upcoming events at The Arena. Once a user finds the event they’re interested in participating in, they’re able to view event price, description and details before they decide if they’d like to sign up.
Tournament Checkout
After clicking the Sign Up button, the user is taken to the checkout process. We can sync with multiple payment processors and platforms as well as set up reoccurring charges for subscriptions. Not only that, but this payment process is unique in that we can flag the system to accept checks as payment.
Coaches, Trainers and Coordinators
Individuals who are coaching or coordinating events are given Admin access to the backend of the system where they have the ability to schedule the games or rounds within a tournament and assign athletes to courts, rooms or areas of the facility.
Back End – Admin Experience
Dashboard
The Dashboard is where all of the magic happens. This is where admins will find the tools they need to create new events like Camps, Clubs, Leagues and Tournaments. Most of the setup work is done in the Contents section of the Dashboard.
CMS Pages
The first step in creating an event is to create a page for the event using the Content Management System (CMS). The CMS is designed to be as user friendly as possible and should be fairly familiar to anyone who has used any word processing applications like MS Word or Apple Pages.
Widgets
The next thing an Admin may want to do is use a Widget to create content that can be reused across multiple pages or areas of the website. Widget content can be anything: image banner, contact form, program details, sponsor images, etc.
SEO Meta Tags
It would be unfortunate to spend time creating an event, only for no one to sign up. That’s why SEO Meta Tags are so important. Adding the keywords and phrases that users would enter when searching for an event is a critical step in creating a successful campaign.
Locations
Some organizations have more than one location. This Locations feature allows the Admin who is coordinating an event to create all of the locations for the organization, as well as choose the facility(s) where a particular event will take place.
Areas
Most facilities can be broken down into multiple areas of activity—such as a rooms or courts—that can be used for tournaments and events. This Areas feature allows the admin to create as many specific areas of activity as needed. An area can then be used and assigned when creating events.
Tournament Scheduler
This tool allows staff and coaches to easily schedule tournaments along with the teams, time and location for each game. Schedules can be completed for each round in a tournament and the subsequent round schedules will be posted to the tournament page for easy access and high visibility. The information for scheduling tournaments is pulled in from the sales orders of athletes who have signed up and purchased a tournament on the front end of the website.
There are multiple options for the types of tournaments that can be scheduled, such as Elimination, Multilevel and Round Robin tournaments. In addition, parents and teams scheduled for a specific a tournament and/or round of a tournaments will be notified via email with each scheduled update that pertains to them.
Sport Categories
Every organization is going to have their own, unique list of sports that they host and offer to their customers. Sports Categories allows the Admin to add or remove as many sports as they need. Additionally, when an Admin creates a new Sports Category, that category is automatically added to the front-end navigation menu for users to interact with.
Promo Codes
This feature allows an Admin to offer discounts of their own discretion to individuals or groups for any event. The Admin has the ability to inactivate or delete a Promo Code after the event has past to ensure that codes are not over-used or abused.
Tournaments
This is where an Admin enters all of the information for a tournament. There is a lot of information that can be added for each tournament. This includes selecting the Location(s) and specific Areas within a location that will be used, the price, the registration cut off date, images and video, descriptions (teaser and full). The Admin can also take advantage of the Draft feature which allows the Admin to create many Tournaments at once without having to Publish them all at once.
Users
This is where Admins will find data on not only the number of members that have signed up within the system, but also really useful information on all events, subscriptions and payments that have been processed. Clicking on each section provides a granular view of all events or transactions for that category.
Reports
The Reports section provides detailed information on all events and transactions. The data can easily be filtered down to show specific information for any given event or sales order. All the information (filtered or otherwise) can also be exported to a CSV file for use in other applications. This is a really valuable tool for analyzing trends in promotions and sales, and is really useful in forecasting and planning future objectives.
System
The Systems section allows the Admin to changes their own profile and account information. The Admin can also create other user roles with varying access restrictions and create other users within those roles. Additionally, all the email templates used for all the system functions (i.e. Lost Password, Invoices, Orders, etc) and all emails related to event communication (i.e. Tournament Scheduling, Event Registrations, etc) can be changed and updated. System functions can be expanded to fit your specific Admin needs.
Conclusion
Managing events for multiple sports and activities can be daunting, to say the least. We get it. That’s why we created the VEA Sports Facility Management System, to save your employees time and free them up to coach, train, and plan future events. This is the kind of work that will foster growth and profitability within your organization, not to mention the morale boost that comes from having the ability to more efficiently manage tournaments.
If the VEA Event Tracker sounds like a good fit for your organization, please feel free to contact Tess Buckley, our Digital Project Manager today for a free demo.
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