Streamlining Skate Oakville's club management with Uplifter

“Our customers are much happier now that they can go online and see their skating calendar, confirmations, class waitlists, and notices telling them when new classes are open.”

Kim Theobald

Club Administrator

Joni McPhail
Skating Director

Kim Theobald
Club Administrator

Overview

As Canada’s largest skating organization, with over 2,500 members and 75 years in operation, Skate Oakville is both steeped in tradition and eager to meet the needs of tomorrow’s skater. When Skate Oakville needed an all-in-one skate club management software solution, there was only one company they found with the required expertise and product features: Uplifter.

Active Participants

1000 +

Using Uplifter for online registration

About Skate Oakville

Skate Oakville is the largest skating organization in Canada, supporting over 2,500 members. Dating back to 1955, the club as built an established track record of developing skaters who find international success. Today, their focus is on nurturing a fun and friendly learn-to-skate and skate-to-win community that challenges everyone to perform at their very best.

Joni McPhail is Skate Oakville’s Skating Director. This means she oversees all of the Skating Club’s operations, including ice scheduling, hiring coaches and support staff, succession planning, program planning, working with the board of directors for sponsorship and marketing, and much more. With over 50 years of involvement in figure skating, Joni focuses her efforts on ensuring every skater is engaged, interested and progressing through the club’s learning programs.

Kim Theobald is Skate Oakville’s senior Club Administrator. While her primary focus is taking care of the books, Kim is a Jack-of-all-trades. In addition to book keeping, she handles the office management, IT issues, training office employees on technical processes, and proactively managing any club administration tasks that are at risk of slipping through the cracks.

The Situation

It’s not difficult to imagine that registration for Canada’s largest skating organization would be time consuming. With over 2,500 members, it was common for Skate Oakville’s office staff to see more than one hundred families waiting in line during in-person registration periods. Before moving to Uplifter, Skate Oakville had a website to help with registration, but the process was still overwhelmingly manual and classes were often being overbooked. As with many skating clubs, the act of registering each athlete was a manual endeavour which included processing transactions, cross-referencing a participant’s past achievements to confirm their skating level, then sorting and adding participants to class lists. Kim explains that from August through to October, the entire office staff could do nothing but process registrations. The registration workload was so onerous that it completely dominated their schedules for two months! It was clear that they needed to automate their registrations from start to finish. Meanwhile, on the skating operations side, Joni’s coaching team was finding it extremely difficult to track the skill development of 2,500 participants. Manually tracking each skater’s skills and accomplishments was time consuming and required a costly amount of coaching hours and organizational effort. What Joni needed was a system that was centralized and easily accessible for her coaches, coaching assistants, and volunteers.

The Solution

Skate Oakville chose Uplifter to automate their registration and takeover a host of tasks including accounts payable, skating test purchases, skills tracking, evaluations, and more.

“The amount of time savings is hard to explain, Uplifter has completely changed the job,” Kim explains. “It easily saves us 24 hours per week, across our four-person office team.”

Tasks like manually confirming registrations used to take days, but now Uplifter instantly validates a participant’s qualifications during an online registration, including their annual Skate Canada membership status.

Processes that used to go through Kim can now be shared across the office. If a parent wants to switch their child from one class to another, and pay the difference in fees, any office staff member can easily complete the transaction with Uplifter. During peak times prior to Uplifter, some of Kim’s tasks needed to be put on the back burner while she powered through registrations, or registrations had to be delayed in order for her to tackle an urgent task. Now, numerous staff members can proactively handle different areas of administration, creating a more efficient workflow.

This new distribution of tasks has allowed Kim to expand her role as Club Administrator.

“The time Uplifter has freed up, has allowed me to increase my productivity and take on new projects.”

Empowering office administration like this, is exactly what drives our passion at Uplifter. The more productive administrators feel they can be, the more time everyone can spend on providing an enriching experience for athletes.

On the skating operations side of things, coaches at Skate Oakville can now complete skill evaluations on the ice, using tablets or mobile phones. All evaluations are easily accessible to other coaches, volunteers, parents, and the Skating Director.

“Uplifter’s analytics allows us to get a snapshot of anything at any time…” Joni explains, “it allows us to have a global perspective on club activities.”

Now it’s easy for the team to monitor session utilization, manage ice pads and individual groups, see skater skill levels, and get a view of where each skater is going next.

Uplifter is more than online registration software, it’s a multi-faceted solution that improves each level of an organization. From office administrators, to coaches, volunteers and Directors, Uplifter has the features and functions to elevate your entire club.

Favourite Features

Joni’s favourite coaching features include:

Athlete Communications:

Skate Oakville now has a direct line of communication with parents and athletes. If there’s an issue with one of their ice pads, Skating Director Joni McPhail and her team can quickly target communications to participants in specific groups, levels, days, or sessions, and send updates to all affected members.

Athlete & Family Profiles:

Joni explains that with individual athlete and family profiles, it’s easy for parents to update their contact information. Parents are no longer finding themselves out of the loop. And, of course, if a parent does miss an update, it’s easy for Joni to jump into the system and see if their contact information has fallen out of date, or if a parent mistakenly unsubscribed from Skate Oakville’s communications.

Support:

The size and complexity of Skate Oakville’s club has produced some unique use cases that Uplifter’s development team has been excited to tackle. Joni says, “if we find a need for a feature, Uplifter develops it and makes it work. We have a great relationship with Uplifter that way.”

Kim’s favourite skating club administration features include:

Ledger:

One of the biggest changes for administration has been consolidating their Ledger reports. “Running Uplifter and our old accounting software in parallel showed us that Uplifter was a good system to rely on,” Kim explains. Now Skate Oakville uses Uplifter as their only source for accounts payable because of the advantages it offers. Rather than adding each of their daily transactions into their old accounting software, Kim can now export, subtotal, and create a single book keeping entry for an entire day’s worth of transactions.

Installment Payments:

By offering installment payments, Skate Oakville allows their customers to flexibly manage the cost of skating. However, the old manual process of transacting monthly payments would take hours. Now it happens automatically, overnight. “I came in on October 1^st and 400 transactions happened overnight, that would have taken a long time to do manually,” Kim said.

Integration with Skate Canada’s Member Database:

Uplifter is Skate Canada’s National Trusted Partner for Skating Club Software, which means clubs using Uplifter can easily query and submit their annual Skate Canada membership subscriptions directly to Skate Canada with just a few clicks.