— Park District of Oak Park

The Park District of Oak Park (PDOP) serves the recreational needs of 52,000 residents of Oak Park, Illinois by offering nearly 3,000 recreation programs and special events every year. Their mission focuses on enriching the lives of their community members by “providing meaningful experiences through parks, programs and facilities.”

Identifying the problem

While PDOP always offered its residents online registration for programs and events, their previous software was too complex. Not only did it lack the flexibility PDOP needed to set up discounts and automate installment billing, but it made for a clunky online experience that was starting to attract too many complaints from residents.

A main pain point for parents was going through separate checkouts for every activity they registered their kids to - unable to pay for everything in one go. Additionally, they would need to fill separate forms for the individual activities they added to their carts and would often lose the spot by the time they were done submitting the forms. To make matters worse, the system would slow down during peak registration periods when hundreds of people were trying to sign up for activities and events at the same time.

Summer Camp registrations 2020 – an online shopping experience better than ever before

Since summer camps are PDOP’s biggest program, attracting thousands of registrations year over year, they knew that a solution that could please residents during peak Camp registration would be the one. They launched SmartRec in December 2019 and used the two months leading up to the launch of their 2020 Summer Camp registration to prepare for the busiest registration event of the year.

How PDOP got there with SmartRec

Flexible payment options

SmartRec enabled PDOP to set up more discounting options, automate installment billing, and offer its community more options to pay for activities and events. This, in turn, gave the community more flexibility when registering online leading to improved client satisfaction.

Streamlined data collection

Members of the Oak Park community can now go about their online registration without worrying about filling numerous forms during checkout and losing their spot to someone else. Forms and waivers show up just once at the end of the checkout process making it quick and easy for shoppers to submit key information without disrupting their registration experience.

Single checkout, no downtime

What the residents at Oak Park love about Amilia is that it mirrors an online shopping experience that they have come to expect in this digital age. Not only can they sign up and pay for several different programs at once with a simple ‘add to cart’, but they also now have the option to save their credit card to their account to make future checkouts quick and painless. Additionally, Amilia is mobile-friendly and is equipped to handle thousands of simultaneous online registrations which means residents are able to shop for PDOP’s offerings on-the-go without ever worrying about the system slowing down or crashing mid-checkout.

If you are interested to learn how SmartRec could help you and your organization succeed like it helped Park District of Oak Park, just reach out to our team. We would be happy to discuss it with you!