Optimizing Gymnastics Ontario's workflow with Uplifter
"In an incredibly short amount of time, the team at Uplifter have helped to streamline our operational processes, which allows us to spend more productive time on providing quality services to our members..."
Kristina Galloway
Membership Services Manager
Active Participants
100000
+
Registered through Uplifter annually
Member Clubs
100
+
Using Uplifter for membership management
Overview
Gymnastics Ontario is a performance-driven organization that won’t settle for “close enough” with its operations. Like their athletes, the federation wants a perfect score. And yet, after working with two different association software providers over 9 years, the Gymnastics Ontario team were still struggling with cumbersome manual processes, time-intensive support calls from Member Clubs, and registration tracking challenges.
They turned to Uplifter for a definitive association management software solution.
About Gymnastics Ontario
Gymnastics Ontario (G.O.) is Canada’s largest provincial gymnastics federation, with 200 clubs and 120,000 registered participants. In 2018, the federation celebrated it’s 50th anniversary of providing safe and accessible gymnastics to all participants across the Province of Ontario. As the Membership Services Manager for Gymnastics Ontario, Kristina Galloway oversees the 200 Member Clubs and the annual registration of all 120,000 individual participants. A major part of her day-to-day used to include helping clubs manage their athlete database and troubleshooting calls from clubs struggling with registration… that is, until she began to use Uplifter’s customizable association management software.
The Situation
In the spring of 2017, Gymnastics Ontario needed to make a major operational change with as little impact on their membership as possible. Despite recently switching to a more modern cloud-based association management system, they were still finding themselves bogged down by numerous manual processes.
With all the unnecessary manual steps, it had become time consuming for Kristina to resolve errors in order to find the numbers she needed. These issues were also causing an increase in calls from the 200 Member Clubs, who were likewise struggling to quickly and accurately report on their annual participant numbers. Gymnastics Ontario knew that when you can’t quickly access and manipulate your revenue and participant data, you impede important business analysis and future projections. Not only that, but the federation also needed to address issues like insurance coverage and risk management for its members. This meant that being able to quickly produce error-free data was imperative. The federation needed a more reliable software solution for the sake of its current operations and future growth.“Too many manual steps created too many opportunities for mistakes,” Kristina explains. “It’s just not possible to effectively mitigate all the opportunities for error when you have so many manual steps.”
The Solution
With an “all hands on deck” commitment, our Uplifter business optimization experts got right to work with Kirstina and the G.O. team. We began by taking a deep dive into their existing operational processes to identify current issues, functional gaps, and future needs. We then customized our Uplifter association management software to deliver a fully integrated online Member Club system that would not just meet, but exceed, all of Gymnastics Ontario’s membership and financial management requirements.
Throughout the process we kept the Member Clubs, athletes and coaches top-of- mind, because we knew their success was key to the success of the entire federation. After all, it’s crucial to be able to trust your data, whether as a business or an athlete. Without consistent and accurate data, you don’t know where you are or how best to improve your performance. And at Uplifter, we’re passionate about using our software to help elevate the potential of others.
The Results
In a mere 4 months, our Uplifter team was able to fully architect and implement a new user-centric association management system that far exceeded the expectations of Kristina and the entire team at Gymnastics Ontario. The association can now quickly produce membership and financial reports without having to waste time troubleshooting errors. This means they have clear visibility to accurate data for annual audits, member insurance, business analysis and future projections.
Uplifter’s software has also significantly decreased the number of support calls Kristina needs to manage. “Those types of calls have gone way down since switching to Uplifter,” Kristina explains. What’s next for the team at Gymnastics Ontario? Kristina says that with Uplifter now automating cumbersome manual processes and administration tasks, G.O.’s dedicated staff are now able to focus on growing their federation and providing the best possible experience for their members. We’re proud to be a partner in Gymnastics Ontario’s uplifting future!“I feel way more confident with our numbers now,” Kristina explains. “Plus, the software is so user friendly. You can tell the designers have thought-out all the settings. Most importantly, you can make the software work exactly how your organization requires, instead of changing your organizational requirements to fit the software.”
