Ask the guys at Community All Stars why they do what they do and the answer is simple: helping high school sports programs succeed. When I taught high school, I quickly learned that sports programs take some of the most at-risk youth and give them a reason to show up every day and work hard. While not strictly a non profit, Community All Stars has enabled many of their schools (they work with hundreds) to bring in $15,000 through fundraisers, apparel, and sponsorship from local community members.
What They Were Doing Right
There was no doubt that they were already a successful company with a strong eye on branding themselves to meet their target audience. Because they employ a team of highly-skilled graphic designers to create marketing materials for their clients, high schools countrywide, they already had a unique look and feel to their online presence.
Where They Needed Help
But appearances can be deceiving and their back-end was holding them back. One of their largest complaints was their their database of schools was spread across multiple systems, some for sales, some for record-keeping, and some for displaying info on their website. When we met, we talked about wasted time and man-hours due to redundancies in their data. If they wanted to update contact info for a client, for example, they’d have to check multiple sites and spreadsheets and hope they were getting the most recent information.
What We Did
Enter the Schools Portal. As we redesigned and rebuilt their website from the ground up, we also took advantage of the content storing power of WordPress and the magic of Rest APIs (a data-storage and retrieval system that breaks down walls). We created a centralized location for all of their client data, using Rest APIs and fancy tools like Angular JS to let them display and manipulate their info as needed. In addition, we were able to connect to their Google Drive, allowing them to make simple edits in Google Spreadsheets that updated online in real-time.
Now their saving man-hours across the board because their website is working for them, efficiently serving data on demand and freeing them up to focus on helping schools raise money.
Screenshots
Visit CommunityAllStars.com.
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