Increasingly complex summer camps and events required a more flexible platform for registration, payments, and reduced accounting.
Camper
Event Registration
Product Design • Service Design • UX Research • Software Engineering
Autopilot for Event Management
Boy Scout council staff often include only a couple of professionals that oversee hundreds of events each year ranging from 20 person trainings to 5,000 participant, multi-session summer camps. Council professionals needed a new system they could control to handle increasingly complex registration for these events.
I worked with council and camp staff and leaders from troops across the country to understand the needs of volunteers who want registration to work for their needs while reducing paperwork. Council staff also played a large role in defining a source of truth that would connect with council data to better serve campers, and assist in reporting.
Camper was open sourced and posted to GitHub and made public in 2016 available with limited support to it’s remaining users.
Role
I was the sole designer and developer for Camper conducting user research, customer support, training, UI/UX design, and software development. I also ran the business side of camper marketing and deploying the platform to a handful of scouting councils in the west.
Goals
Successful Registration Starts with Intuitive Onboarding
The project kicked off in 2013 with user interview workshops at 3 summer camps ideating the ideal registration experience for the 2014 season.
I found that 80% of users looking to register were new to the registration process as parents age out and new volunteers take their place. An intuitive process was essential to help reduce errors which made up a significant amount of work for council professionals.
Users also wanted the process to be fun. Camper walks new users through signup with a conversational onboarding process. How Camper works is embedded in the sign up forms helping orient users in creating their account, adding their unit, and successfully collecting validated data so staff don’t need to worry about data entry. 5 minutes and a new user can be fully onboarded and registered for a simple event with invites sent and payments approved.
Registrations as Living Records
Camper was designed from the start with full summer camp registration capabilities. This included everything from event options and finances to rosters and class registration.
Each registration starts with the unit, number of participants, and a deposit payment. As the event develops and additional functionality is unlocked, users can update their registrations. For example, rosters can be created and unit members can be assigned to slots. Participant data can be collected to accomodate everything from shirt sizes and birthdays to insurance details and medical conditions. This data is used to populate reports accessible through Camper At Camp where event staff can plan ahead and prepare for participant needs.
Finances Simplified
Robust calculation of a complex web of participant fees, options, discounts, and payments come together to build a ledger for each registration broken down to the individual participant’s cost. Registration reports can be generated and printed showing the individual costs for each participant maintaining transparent pricing and billing.
Options, discounts, and fees can be customized to apply to the unit, the individual participants or to particular participant types such as adults vs youth. Payments are collected via a number of payment methods including credit card via PayPal for automated approval to manual check and cash transactions.
As payments and charges are created and modified through the registration process through the planning and duration of the event, a ledger is maintained and any remaining balance can be collected and overpayment can be refunded. Admin reports can be customized and imported into council financial tracking systems including QuickBooks.
Class Registration
All events support class registration and build on the Activity Library in Camper. Start by adding activities such as merit badge classes, trainings, and other activities. Add classes hosted to these activities and assign times, locations, and soft and hard limits for registration. Camper maintains sign up sequences for individual participants to lock classes once they hit a soft limit and maintain an active waitlist function opening up spots as schedules evolve. Costs for classes and supplies can be collected before the event and participants can request that supplies be ready for them when they arrive if supported by the event.
Admin Experience
Staff have access to a full suite of management tools that range from supporting onboarding and user sign up to event configuration. A notification and messaging system keeps track of emails, notifications, and errors and reporting tools including the Report Builder, a customizable interface for crafting data exports.
Permissions can be customized to give admin access to various events to volunteers and event staff without exposing personal user data and the At Camp feature provides access to a collection of pre-designed PDF and CSV exports for Unit Rosters, Dietary Restrictions, Class Rosters, Birthday lists, Preorder Requests, Merit Badge Cards and Certificates, Check-In, and Financial Invoicing and Billing.