Automating competition registration for Canada’s largest Provincial Skating Organization

“If you have any ideas on how to create, change, or update processes for your specific organization or club, just reach out to Uplifter.”

Kelsey Bennett

Manager of Events and Officials, Skate Ontario

Skating Competitions

30 +

Managed using Uplifter annually

Active Participants

9500 +

Registered through Uplifter annually

Event Categories

50 +

Used for highly customized competition registrations in Uplifter

Overview

For over 50 years, figure skating in Ontario was managed by four regional Skate Canada sections, each with its own volunteer governing board, staff, schedule of competitive events, and event registration processes. In 2016, Skate Canada voted to amalgamate these sections into a single provincial sport organization (PSO), Skate Ontario. By spring of 2017, the difficult work of amalgamation at the operations level was well underway. However, competition registration was a very complicated issue to be addressed with a provincial scope. In order to serve this new exceptionally large and diverse membership, Skate Ontario had to find a single event registration system that could meet their intense customization requirements in time for their quickly-approaching 2017/18 competition season. They researched all of their event software options and confidently selected Uplifter for its robust customization, reporting, support guarantee, and front-to-back user-friendly design.

About Skate Ontario

Skate Ontario is Canada’s largest provincial skating association with 75,000 members, and home to numerous Olympic and World Champion figure skaters. As Manager of Events and Officials, Kelsey is responsible to ensure that there are meaningful competitive experiences for athletes at the “Learn to Train” and “Train to Compete” long term athlete developmental stages. She is also responsible for the strategic and operational planning of events to align with athlete development, as well as the training, development and support of officials. When Kelsey and the Skate Ontario team planned their amalgamation of four sections, they knew they needed comprehensive software that could meet all of their technical needs and support the long-term development of both athletes and officials.

The Situation

With their new mandate of unification, Skate Ontario knew there would be close to 50 annual competitions requiring one integrated database and an intuitive registration tool that could manage over 10,000 competitive skaters registering in over 100 event categories. Moreover, Kelsey and her team needed very specific reporting to track the success of their competitions and identify areas of improvement whenever they existed. They also wanted to prioritize a user-friendly design that allowed staff to intuitively navigate the system, and they desired a solution that was tested and proven to deliver top results. All in all, Skate Ontario wanted a registration software provider that truly understood the ins and outs of the figure skating world in order to meet the level of excellence Skate Ontario provides. They turned to Uplifter for a powerful and proven solution.

The Solution

In just two weeks, from demo to launch, the Uplifter team put in place a world-class competition registration solution for Skate Ontario. Since then, Skate Ontario has expanded its use of Uplifter to include team events and coaching workshops, and is now thriving as it serves its provincial mandate. Kelsey remarks, “My team has been able to manage registration annually for 47 competitions, which is incredible.” With all of these competitions in 4 different series, with 4 figure skating disciplines, and up to 1,000 registrants in each competition; the Skate Ontario team has benefited from the customization and powerful event automation that Uplifter provides. Kelsey explains that Skate Ontario initially chose Uplifter because Uplifter,

“specialized in figure skating, was tried and tested, user friendly from the back-end and front-end, could supply us with the correct reports we needed, were open to customization, and had a great support guarantee.”

After running their event registrations with Uplifter, not only has Skate Ontario been able to manage an incredible number of complex competitions annually, they’ve seen customer satisfaction increase as well. “Since the introduction of the new pre-registration process in 2019, improved customer satisfaction has been expressed to us directly,” Kelsey says. By introducing more efficient processes and continually looking for ways to meet and exceed the needs of their membership, Skate Ontario is able to use Uplifter to stay on the cutting edge of competition management.

“Uplifter has been a great resource to consult with when looking at improved processes and different approaches to meet the needs of our organization from a software registration perspective. The possibilities do seem endless!”

Skate Ontario continues to evolve to serve its active and growing membership. Among the biggest advantages of using Uplifter, Kelsey cites “access to fast support and the ability to talk to developers about new concepts and ideas.” Through these open communication channels, the Uplifter team continues to innovate to help Skate Ontario accelerate its success.

Favourite Features

Online Registration:

Bringing registration online has innumerable benefits. At the core of these benefits is automation and the elimination of endless manual data entry. When participants sign-up for their competitions or an official’s training event, each individual enters their own details with no need for administrators to transcribe from handwritten registration forms or copy and paste into cumbersome spreadsheets. Plus, Uplifter’s built-in automation seamlessly leverages this data to streamline event management in user friendly and intuitive ways.

Athlete Profiles:

Uplifter’s athlete profiles give individuals the ability to update selected information on their own. These editing functions save time and effort for Kelsey and her team. Instead of having to tediously field requests and complete hundreds of profile changes leading up to competitions, Skate Ontario can stay focused on more important strategic, and quality-driven tasks.

Email Tools:

With Uplifter’s email tools, Kelsey and her team can quickly email important updates to individual skaters or groups of skaters. This means Skate Ontario can easily email relevant updates to skaters performing on specific days, within specific series or disciplines. When you combine the power of automation with communication tools like this, time savings are multiplied!