How we created a better solution for successful event management.
2020 has been a year of challenging the way we do things — reinventing our lives to work around the COVID-19 pandemic and trying to restore a sense of normality during these trying times. A major factor of this is physical distancing requirements and contact tracing. As different countries develop their own apps to monitor this, event organisers and businesses have scrambled to pull together their own systems to meet national standards around this issue.
Australia has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020, showing that no country is immune to this disease. We have experienced major disruptions to events and strict isolation orders in place to varying degrees across the nation. As there has been a stabilisation of cases in South Australia, major events can now occur there again — but strict protocols must be put in place to reduce the risk of a second wave.
BMX South Australia (BMX SA) is the state body for the sport, and organises a yearly titles competition. It is open to anyone in Australia to come and compete against riders in their class, in a new location in South Australia every year.
BMX is one of the few sports where mostly everything is online. This takes a lot of admin work away from volunteers, and makes major events run a bit more smoothly. The only long-standing tangible product that BMX SA has held onto over the years is the program for the weekend-long event. Like many events, it’s a paper program that is costly to produce and print, and is often thrown out the window by the first day, as changes occur to racing times. These changes may be due to someone having a crash, weather changes or races running longer than others as classes change. This paper method doesn’t allow for any data collection either — which is a valuable insight for marketing and promotional purposes, as well as contact tracing for COVID-19.
We developed a solution that replaces the dated paper booklet and streamlines the data collection and maintenance process for the volunteers at BMX SA. We developed a custom website that was focused on being mobile-friendly first, and designed to look like a progressive web application. All of the information on the site can be updated on the fly, by either a mobile or a desktop computer, by simply logging into the website’s CMS.
The website collects the contact information of everyone who is attending the event, whether they are spectators, staff, contractors or riders. It also collects their time stamps when they are at the track. This allows BMX SA to act fast in the event that contact tracing needs to occur.
This data gives them a key insight into who their customers are, how long they spend at the event and what they do there — which is a crucial marketing tool that can be used to improve each event, year after year. The website is completely editable, so the organisation can continue to use the same product to do the same thing — just tweaking things every year to match the location and needs of the riders at the time. Moving away from the traditional print way of thinking — of having something that is just single use — is no longer good enough; for not only conveying information, but for environmental and financial sustainability.
Not only can changes to the website be made on the fly, but attendees can easily add the schedule to their own email or phone calendar — giving them notifications on when events change and their times straight to their smartphone. This allows attendees to plan out their weekend, and to be able to adapt quickly as the event changes.
State BMX events attract riders from not only intrastate, but interstate as well. Riders may never have been to that town before, or the race track they are about to race on. There can be a lot of confusion and missed opportunities for new riders during their time in a new location. To combat this, we’ve been able to add in pages with crucial information, like where the toilets are located, food and accommodation options around the event, and stalls that will be at the event on the day. We’re even able to add in mud maps on emergency exit points and parking, so all the information is available prior to and during the event for everyone to access.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen information that traditionally wasn’t expected to work online to be forced to move online over the past six months. This has been vital for many businesses to continue revenue streams and maintain customer satisfaction. Additionally, this is something users will expect from now on — why does something need to be only accessible in person, when we’ve now lived in a world where everything is being adapted to online access?
Thinking outside the box on how two traditional, stand-alone pieces of marketing can be integrated together, to make an effective and accessible platform for customers, is the new normal. Customers will now expect this from businesses — to go above and beyond to make life easier by moving online.
