How to Review and Test Your Youth Sports Registration Process
Posted in:
Sports Org Insider
Get Monthly Insights, Tips and Best Practices to Help Your Run and Grow Your Sports Organization
Reviewing and testing your youth sports registration process is easy to do with these tips.
Sports organizers understand that registration season can turn into one of the most overwhelming times of the year. Staying organized and prepared is a surefire way to avoid the stresses of signing up hundreds (or thousands) of new youth athletes.
When working on a registration campaign, sports organizers can agree that reviewing and testing the process (before it opens) is one of the best ways to set yourself up for success. How exactly do you review and test your registration? Where do you start?
TeamSnap for Clubs & Leagues shares four ways to review and test your youth sports registration process.
Review and Test Your Youth Sports Registration Process
#1 Build the Youth Sports Registration Form with Enough Lead Time
The first step in reviewing and testing your youth sports registration process comes as a bit of a caveat. You won’t have enough time to review or test if your form isn’t built with enough lead time before the season!
TeamSnap recently chatted with Rose Gumz, Director of Customer Success at JustiFi during our webinar on launching registration. Gumz explained the importance of lead time. While the registration itself can happen in a week, or even less, the prep that goes into that is all about collecting the data and making sure the form encompasses everything your organization wants.
“I think giving yourself a solid six months where you’re starting to think about next season is a good way to stay on top of it. We all know summer is coming to a close and it’s time for back to school, like where did the last three months go?” said Gumz. “A six-month lead time or even if you can stretch it out a little bit more, that’s great because it gives you the time to really test things out and double-check the details which are really important with registration.”
#2 Try the Review/Testing Process Yourself
We’ll get into the idea of bringing others in to test your registration later. But, to start, test it out yourself! This is one of those simple exercises that sometimes can easily be forgotten in the busy shuffle between seasons.
Gumz is also an advocate of testing registration forms and processes yourself.
She dove into how the preview mode feature with TeamSnap for Clubs & Leagues registration is crucial to explore before launching.”[Preview mode] allows you to go through and do it exactly as your customers and as your members are going to go through the registration, so you can see exactly what they’re going to do, and you will know what it’s going to look like, and how it’s going to flow. This lets you know that if something may not link to the way that you wanted it to, it gives you the opportunity to really just kind of go through that entire process and then make changes and edits as you need.”
#3 Recruit the Help from Other Members of Your Organization
So you’ve given yourself enough time to build, test, and review your forms. Then you started reviewing the process yourself, using TeamSnap for Club & Leagues’ preview mode. Now what?
Go get that help from the other members of your organization! It could be other board members, members of your staff, or even the best volunteer parents. Ask them to log in and give the registration forms a look over. They could go through the process with fake players (which you’ll go in and delete afterward). It’s also an incentive to get help from those parent volunteers. Let them sign up for their children ahead of time by giving the registration form a test run before it goes live.
Give yourself enough time to receive any feedback from the volunteers and collect that data in an organized way.
#4 Tweak, Repeat, and Finalize!
The final step? Use that feedback to make some tweaks to the process. Getting feedback can be challenging, but remember, this is coming from the people who care both deeply about your organization and the most important people involved = the athletes!
With as much lead time as you’ve built in, keep tweaking and perfecting your registration process. And when the time comes, trust that you’ve taken the proper steps to ensure this registration season goes smoothly without a hitch.
