Case study: Custom event registration

IF:Gathering

IF:Gathering is a Women’s Ministry organization with a mission to equip women for discipleship. As part of this mission they host a yearly gathering that they make available to satellite sites world-wide. These satellite events are called IF:Local. View the site

The Problem

When they came to me, they had struggled in years prior to find a reliable solution which allowed satellite hosts to register events and provide those hosts with a platform to manage registration and payment for their IF:Local attendees. They had previously experienced failed charges, entire site outages during periods of high traffic, and a myriad of missed opportunities to accurately capture the data of IF:Local attendees. This cost them employee and volunteer time, money, and the ability to serve their ultimate purpose and engage with the audience beyond the initial simulcast to encourage and equip them.

THE APPROACH

Identified Needs and Solutions

  • CUSTOM THEME/PLUGIN AND USERFLOW FOR WORDPRESS MULTISITE, HOSTED ON AWS

    Utilizing WordPress multi-site on an Amazon Web Service hosting platform, my leadership provided a way for hosts to register and pay for their IF:Local event. Using multi-site we were able to keep data segregated and allow for each IF:Local host to customize and administer their own event and attendees. They could determine the cost they needed to charge beyond the national base price. They could customize their own registration form, and create a landing page unique to their event. We were also able to provide a map that highlighted each IF:Local event and allow users to find an event in their area. We anticipated traffic needs and utilized a load balancer that could automatically add resources to the server environment when needed.

  • I knew that IF:Gathering needed a way they could successfully capture funds in one transaction and distribute them to multiple
    accounts while doing so in a way that did not jeopardize their non-profit status.

    CUSTOM GRAVITY FORMS ADD-ON PLUGIN IMPLEMENTING STRIPE CONNECT

    We used Stripe Connect which allowed us to set up a system, where the IF:Local hosts connected their own Stripe account to the IF:Gathering Stripe account with just a few button clicks. The IF:Local Stripe account collected the initial funds and then automatically sent IF:Gathering’s portion on to IF:Gathering.

  • CUSTOM PLUGIN IMPLEMENTING THE INFUSIONSOFT (KEAP) API

    IF:Gathering utilizes InfusionSoft/Keap as their CRM. We were able to set up a system that would attempt to sync data with InfusionSoft in real time, but should the real-time sync fail on InfusionSoft’s end it did not halt the user’s progress on the IF:Local registration site. We provided a way to log these, and attempt the sync at a later time.

What was accomplished

The Results

In year one of utilizing this new system, IF:Gathering successfully registered over 2000 IF:Local locations, and over 40,000 IF:Local attendees. My team eliminated missed credit card charges, as well as the loss of data, while also maintaining site availability at all times. The IF:Gathering team reported a significant reduction in support time to manage and provide assistance to IF:Local hosts and attendees. They are currently in year three with over 6,000 locations registered.